Mining the web for hyponymy relations based on property inheritance

Abstract

Concept hierarchies, such as hyponymy and meronymy relations, are very important for various natural language processing systems. Many researchers have tackled how to mine very large corpora of documents such as the Web for them not manually but automatically. However, their methods are mostly based on lexico-syntactic patterns as not necessary but sufficient conditions of concept hierarchies, so they can achieve high precision but low recall when using stricter patterns or they can achieve high recall but low precision when using looser patterns. In this paper, property inheritance from a concept to its hyponyms is assumed to be necessary and sufficient conditions of hyponymy relations to achieve high recall and not low precision, and we propose a method to acquire hyponymy relations from the Web based on property inheritance. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.