A Bootstrapping Algorithm for Automatically Harvesting Semantic Relations

Abstract

In this paper, we present Espresso, a weakly-supervised iterative algorithm combined with a web-based knowledge expansion technique, for extracting binary semantic relations. Given a small set of seed instances for a particular relation, the system learns lexical patterns, applies them to extract new instances, and then uses the Web to filter and expand the instances. Preliminary experiments show that Espresso extracts highly precise lists of a wide variety of semantic relations when compared with two state of the art systems.