INRIASAC: Simple Hypernym Extraction Methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces simple, heuristic-based methods for hypernym extraction from large text corpora, achieving top performance in the SemEval 2015 taxonomy structuring task.

Contribution

It presents straightforward techniques using Wikipedia data and heuristics that outperform more complex methods in hypernym extraction.

Findings

Ranked first in SemEval 2015 taxonomy task

Effective use of Wikipedia and simple heuristics

Achieved strong results with minimal complexity

Abstract

Given a set of terms from a given domain, how can we structure them into a taxonomy without manual intervention? This is the task 17 of SemEval 2015. Here we present our simple taxonomy structuring techniques which, despite their simplicity, ranked first in this 2015 benchmark. We use large quantities of text (English Wikipedia) and simple heuristics such as term overlap and document and sentence co-occurrence to produce hypernym lists. We describe these techniques and pre-sent an initial evaluation of results.