BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: UCB//S2K-91-09 
ENTRY:: February 17, 1994 
TITLE:: Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms 
        from Large Text Corpora 
DATE:: July 1992 
AUTHOR:: Hearst, Marti A.
PAGES:: 8
ABSTRACT:: We describe a method for the 
automatic acquisition of the hyponymy 
lexical relation from unrestricted text.
Two goals motivate the approach: (i)
avoidance of the need for pre-encoded
knowledge and (ii) applicability across
a wide range of text. We identify a set of
lexico-syntactic patterns that are easily
recognizable, that occur frequently and 
across text genre boundaries, and that
indisputably indicate the lexical relation
of interest. We describe a method for 
discovering these patterns and suggest that
other lexical relations will also be acquirable
in this way. A subset of the acquisition algorithm 
is implemented and the results are used to
augment and critique the structure of a large
hand-built thesaurus. Extensions and applications
To areas such as information retrieval are suggested. 
RETRIEVAL:: postscript (in all.ps)
END:: UCB//S2K-91-09