Exploiting multiple sources for open-domain hypernym discovery

Hypernym discovery aims to extract such noun pairs that one noun is a hypernym of the other. Most previous methods are based on lexical patterns but perform badly on opendomain data. Other work extracts hypernym relations from encyclopedias but has limited coverage. This paper proposes a simple yet effective distant supervision framework for Chinese open-domain hypernym discovery. Given an entity name, we try to discover its hypernyms by leveraging knowledge from multiple sources, i.e., search engine results, encyclopedias, and morphology of the entity name. First, we extract candidate hypernyms from the above sources. Then, we apply a statistical ranking model to select correct hypernyms. A set of novel features is proposed for the ranking model. We also present a heuristic strategy to build a large-scale noisy training data for the model without human annotation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on a manually labeled test dataset.