Automatic extraction of semantic relationships for WordNet by means of pattern learning from Wikipedia

Abstract

This paper describes an automatic approach to identify lexical patterns which represent semantic relationships between concepts, from an on-line encyclopedia. Next, these patterns can be applied to extend existing ontologies or semantic networks with new relations. The experiments have been performed with the Simple English Wikipedia and WordNet 1.7. A new algorithm has been devised for automatically generalising the lexical patterns found in the encyclopedia entries. We have found general patterns for the hyperonymy, hyponymy, holonymy and meronymy relations and, using them, we have extracted more than 1200 new relationships that did not appear in WordNet originally. The precision of these relationships ranges between 0.61 and 0.69, depending on the relation.