Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms from Large Text Corpora

The paper presents a method for the automatic acquisition of the hyponymy lexical relation from unrestricted text, driven by two goals: avoiding the need for pre-encoded knowledge, and being applicable across a wide range of text. The approach identifies a set of lexico-syntactic patterns that are easily recognizable, occur frequently and across text genre boundaries, and indisputably indicate the hyponymy relation. It also describes a procedure for discovering these patterns and suggests that other lexical relations could be acquired in the same way.

A subset of the acquisition algorithm is implemented, and its results are used to augment and critique the structure of a large hand-built thesaurus. The author suggests extensions and applications to areas such as information retrieval. The pattern-based technique, now known as Hearst patterns, became a foundational method for automatic lexical and ontology acquisition.