Automatising the learning of lexical patterns: An application to the enrichment of WordNet by extracting semantic relationships from Wikipedia

This paper describes an automatic approach to identify lexical patterns that represent semantic relationships between concepts in an on-line encyclopedia. Next, these patterns can be applied to extend existing ontologies or semantic networks with new relations. The experiments have been performed with the Simple English Wikipedia and WordNet 1.7. A new algorithm has been devised for automatically generalising the lexical patterns found in the encyclopedia entries. We have found general patterns for the hyperonymy, hyponymy, holonymy and meronymy relations and, using them, we have extracted more than 2600 new relationships that did not appear in WordNet originally. The precision of these relationships depends on the degree of generality chosen for the patterns and the type of relation, being around 60–70% for the best combinations proposed.