A Study on the Interplay Between the Corpus Size and Parameters of a Distributional Model for Term Classification

We propose and evaluate a method for identifying co-hyponym lexical units in a terminological resource. The principles of term recognition and distributional semantics are combined to extract terms from a similar category of concept. Given a set of candidate terms, random projections are employed to represent them as low-dimensional vectors. These vectors are derived automatically from the frequency of the co-occurrences of the candidate terms and words that appear within windows of text in their proximity (context-windows). In a $k$-nearest neighbours framework, these vectors are classified using a small set of manually annotated terms which exemplify concept categories. We then investigate the interplay between the size of the corpus that is used for collecting the co-occurrences and a number of factors that play roles in the performance of the proposed method: the configuration of context-windows for collecting co-occurrences, the selection of neighbourhood size ($k$), and the choice of similarity metric.