TAXI at SemEval-2016 Task 13: a Taxonomy Induction Method based on Lexico-Syntactic Patterns, Substrings and Focused Crawling

We present a system for taxonomy construction that reached the first place in all subtasks of the SemEval 2016 challenge on Taxonomy Extraction Evaluation. Our simple yet effective approach harvests hypernyms with substring inclusion and Hearst-style lexicosyntactic patterns from domain-specific texts obtained via language model based focused crawling. Extracted taxonomies are evaluated on English, Dutch, French and Italian for three domains each (Food, Environment and Science). Evaluations against a gold standard and by human judgment show that our method outperforms more complex and knowledge-rich approaches on most domains and languages. Furthermore, to adapt the method to a new domain or language, only a small amount of manual labour is needed.