We describe a method for the automatic acquisition of the hyponymy lexical relation from unrestricted text. Two goals motivate the approach: (i) avoidance of the need for pre-encoded knowledge and (ii) applicability across a wide range of text. We identify a set of lexico-syntactic patterns that are easily recognizable, that occur iYequently and across text genre boundaries, and that indisputably indicate the lexical relation of interest. We describe a method for discovering these patterns and suggest that other lexical relations will also be acquirable in this way. A subset of the acquisition algorithm is implemented and the results are used to attgment and critique the structure of a large hand-built thesaurus. Extensions and applications to areas such as information retrieval are suggested.
REF handcrafted a set of lexico-syntactic paths that connect the joint occurrences of x and y which indicate hypernymy in a large corpus.
Automatic Acquisition Of Hyponyms From Large Text Corpora
International Conference On Computational Linguistics
Computer Science