Towards a methodology for automatic identification of hypernyms in the definitions of large-scale dictionary

The purpose of this paper is to identify automatically hypernyms for dictionary entries by exploring their definitions. In order to do this, we propose a weighting methodology that lets us assign to each lexeme a weight in a definition. This fact allows us to predict that lexemes with the highest weight are the closest hypernyms of the defined lexeme in the dictionary. The extracted semantic relation “is-a” is used for the automatic construction of a thesaurus for image indexing and retrieval. We conclude the paper by showing some experimental results to validate our method and by presenting our methodology of automatic thesaurus construction.