Tel(s)-Telle(s)-Signs: Highly Accurate Automatic Crosslingual Hypernym Discovery

Abstract

We report a highly accurate hypernym discovery heuristic that works on unrestricted texts. This approach leverages morphological cues in French, but given any parallel data and word alignment tool, this proves to be a technique that can work reliably in other languages as well. We tested this method using two French-English corpora of different genres (medical and news) and attained near-perfect accuracy. The key idea is to exploit morphological information in the French trigger phrase 'tel(s)/telle(s)- que' (meaning "such as" in English) to uniquely identify the correct hypernym. This shows to be an inexpensive and effective heuristic also when there are multiple noun phrases preceding the trigger phrase, as in the case of prepositional phrase attachment causing ambiguity in interpretation and hypernym acquisition, indicating that this pattern in French is more informative than its English counterpart.

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