Chinese Hypernym-Hyponym Extraction from User Generated Categories

Hypernym-hyponym ({``}is-a{''}) relations are key components in taxonomies, object hierarchies and knowledge graphs. While there is abundant research on is-a relation extraction in English, it still remains a challenge to identify such relations from Chinese knowledge sources accurately due to the flexibility of language expression. In this paper, we introduce a weakly supervised framework to extract Chinese is-a relations from user generated categories. It employs piecewise linear projection models trained on a Chinese taxonomy and an iterative learning algorithm to update models incrementally. A pattern-based relation selection method is proposed to prevent {``}semantic drift{''} in the learning process using bi-criteria optimization. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.