Exploiting Strong Syntactic Heuristics and Co-Training to Learn Semantic Lexicons

We present a bootstrapping method that uses strong syntactic heuristics to learn semantic lexicons. The three sources of information are appositives, compound nouns, and ISA clauses. We apply heuristics to these syntactic structures, embed them in a bootstrapping architecture, and combine them with co-training. Results on WSJ articles and a pharmaceutical corpus show that this method obtains high precision and finds a large number of terms.