USAAR at SemEval-2016 Task 13: Hyponym Endocentricity

This paper describes our submission to the SemEval-2016 Taxonomy Extraction Evaluation (TExEval-2) Task. We examine the endocentric nature of hyponyms and propose a simple rule-based method to identify hypernyms at high precision. For the food domain, we extract lists of terms from the Wikipedia lists of lists by using the name of each list as the endocentric head and treating all terms in the extracted tables as the hyponym of the endocentric head. Our submission achieved competitive results in taxonomy construction and ranked top in hypernym identification when evaluated against gold standard taxonomies and also in manual evaluation of novel relations not covered by the gold standard taxonomies.