Our sample domain was the book Alice in Wonderland . Results have been made accessible through an interactive web interface . Building the Hypernym Tree To build the hypernym tree we first use the Church tagger to find nouns in Alice. Our tree, then, reflects a distinct subse t of the WordNet hierarchy, tailored specifically to the Alice domain. Each node of our tree is either a noun that actually appears in the text, or a concept along the hyponym path from a noun in the text to the top of the tree.
Every noun node contains the number of times the word appears in the text.
One complication of building the hypernym tree is that a given noun can have multiple senses, hence multiple paths up the tree. As part of our approach holds that each and every sense may in fact bear relevance to the text and cannot be ignored, we have added all senses of all nouns to our tree. As it currently stands in our implementaion, each sense of each word has been assigned equal weighting. It is acknowledged that the act of giving all of the senses equal weight does, on the average, place undue weight on the more obscure senses. For example, our current implementation holds that, if the word 'cat' appears 18 times in the text, both the concept of 'xrays' and the concept of 'animals' will be assigned an additional frequency of 18.