The Descent of Hierarchy, and Selection in Relational Semantics

TitleThe Descent of Hierarchy, and Selection in Relational Semantics
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsRosario, B., Hearst M. A., & Fillmore C. J.
Published inProceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002)
Page(s)247-254
Other Numbers3729
Abstract

In many types of technical texts, meaning is embedded in noun compounds. A language understanding program needs to be able to interpret these in order to ascertain sentence meaning. We explore the possibility of using an existing lexical hierarchy for the purpose of placing words from a noun compound into categories, and then using this category membership to determine the relation that holds between the nouns. In this paper we present the results of an analysis of this method on two-word noun compounds from the biomedical domain, obtaining classification accuracy of approximately 90%. Since lexical hierarchies are not necessarily ideally suited for this task, we also pose the question: how far down the hierarchy must the algorithm descend before all the terms within the subhierarchy behave uniformly with respect to the semantic relation in question? We find that the topmost levels of the hierarchy yield an accurate classification, thus providing an economic way of assigning relations to noun compounds.

URLhttp://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/ai/descenthierarchy02.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pp. 247-254

Abbreviated Authors

B. Rosario, M. Hearst, and C. J. Fillmore

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings