When Hearst Is not Enough: Improving Hypernymy Detection from Corpus with Distributional Models
Changlong Yu, Jialong Han, Peifeng Wang, Yangqiu Song, Hongming Zhang, Wilfred Ng, Shuming Shi · 2020
We address hypernymy detection, i.e., whether an is-a relationship exists between words (x, y), with the help of large textual corpora.Most conventional approaches to this task have been categorized to be either pattern-based or distributional.Recent studies suggest that pattern-based ones are superior, if large-scale Hearst pairs are extracted and fed, with the sparsity of unseen (x, y) pairs relieved.However, they become invalid in some specific sparsity cases, where x or y is not involved in any pattern.For the first time, this paper quantifies the non-negligible existence of those specific cases.We also demonstrate that distributional methods are ideal to make up for patternbased ones in such cases.We devise a complementary framework, under which a patternbased and a distributional model collaborate seamlessly in cases which they each prefer.On several benchmark datasets, our framework achieves competitive improvements and the case study shows its better interpretability.