Automatically Learning Text Patterns to Extract Relations from Domain Documents

Background

Ruiz-Casado et al. extend WordNet by extracting hyponym, hyperonym, holonym and meronym relations from the simple english version of WikiPedia. The authors automize

• the extraction of relations and
• the process of learning textual patterns modeling these relations (e.g. X is one of the PLURAL-NOUN in Y)

The described approach applies the following steps:

• word sense disambiguation
• pattern extraction based on existing relations in WordNet
• pattern generalization of the patterns retrieved in the step above
• identification of new relations

The authors show that the precision of the generated patterns is similar to patterns written by hand.

Tasks

• implement a simple vector-space-based component for word sense disambiguation
• extract lexical patterns from a corpus based on known relations
• implement an algorithm for generalizing these patterns
• test these pattern on the corpus for identifying new relations.

Literature

1. Ruiz-Casado, Maria, Alfonseca, Enrique and Castells, Pablo (2007). Automatising the learning of lexical patterns: An application to the enrichment of WordNet by extracting semantic relationships from Wikipedia, Data \& Knowledge Engineering, pages 484 - 499, 61(3)
2. Hearst, Marti A. (1992). Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms from Large Text Corpora, Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING’92), pages 539–545
3. Fellbaum, C. (1998). WordNet - An Electronic Lexical Database, Computational Linguistics, pages 292–296, 25(2)