Taxonomy Construction Using Syntactic Contextual Evidence

Taxonomies are the backbone of many structured, semantic knowledge resources. Recent works for extracting taxonomic relations from text focused on collecting lexical-syntactic patterns to extract the taxonomic relations by matching the patterns to text. These approaches, however, often show low coverage due to the lack of contextual analysis across sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that collectively utilizes contextual information of terms in syntactic structures such that if the set of contexts of a term includes most of contexts of another term, a subsumption relation between the two terms is inferred. We apply this method to the task of taxonomy construction from scratch, where we introduce another novel graph-based algorithm for taxonomic structure induction. Our experiment results show that the proposed method is well complementary with previous methods of linguistic pattern matching and significantly improves recall and thus F-measure.