HypoTerm: Detection of hypernym relations between domain-specific terms in Dutch and English

HypoTerm is a data-driven semantic relation finder that starts from a list of automatically extracted domain- and user-specific terms from technical corpora, and generates a list of relations between these terms. This research study focused on the detection of hypernym relations between relevant terms and named entities. In order to detect all relevant hypernym relations in technical texts, we combined a lexico-syntactic pattern-based approach and a morpho-syntactic analyzer. To evaluate our relation finder, we constructed and manually annotated gold standard data for the dredging and financial domain in Dutch and English. The experimental results show that the HypoTerm system achieves high precision and recall figures for technical texts when starting from valid domain-specific terms and named entities. Thanks to this data-driven approach, it is possible to take an important step from terminology to concept extraction without using any external lexico-semantic resources.