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

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11428817_7Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2005, Alicante, Spain, June 15-17, 2005.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.This work has been sponsored by CICYT, project number TIC2002-01948