Identifying Semantic Relations in Context: Near-misses and Overlaps

This paper addresses the problem of semantic relation identification for a set of relations difficult to differentiate: near-misses and overlaps. Based on empirical observations on a fairly large dataset of such examples we provide an analysis and a taxonomy of such cases. Using this taxonomy we create various contingency sets of relations. These semantic categories are automatically identified by training and testing three state-of-the-art semantic classifiers employing various feature sets. The results show that in order to identify such near-misses and overlaps accurately, a semantic relation identification system needs to go beyond the ontological information of the two nouns and rely heavily on contextual and pragmatic knowledge.