Abstract

Automatic hypernymy discovery continues to present challenges for natural language processing. Polysemous nouns are linked to more than one hypernym and can therefore cause structural damage on a lexical taxonomy. For instance, the Spanish noun tarantula ('tarantula') is a hyponym of arana ('spider'), but this is also a polysemous noun, as it means 'chandelier' as well. It is thus necessary to determine the next hypernym in the chain, that is animal ('animal') or artefacto ('artifact'). In this paper we explore methods to solve this problem using a similarity measure that uses verb-noun co-occurrence as a predictor variable. Best results (84% success) are obtained with a simple method that only measures co-occurrence, irrespective of any syntactic information.