Distributional Inclusion Vector Embedding for Unsupervised Hypernymy Detection

Modeling hypernymy, such as poodle is-a dog, is an important generalization aid to many NLP tasks, such as entailment, coreference, relation extraction, and question answering. Supervised learning from labeled hypernym sources, such as WordNet, limits the coverage of these models, which can be addressed by learning hypernyms from unlabeled text. Existing unsupervised methods either do not scale to large vocabularies or yield unacceptably poor accuracy. This paper introduces distributional inclusion vector embedding (DIVE), a simple-to-implement unsupervised method of hypernym discovery via per-word non-negative vector embeddings which preserve the inclusion property of word contexts in a low-dimensional and interpretable space. In experimental evaluations more comprehensive than any previous literature of which we are aware-evaluating on 11 datasets using multiple existing as well as newly proposed scoring functions-we find that our method provides up to double the precision of previous unsupervised embeddings, and the highest average performance, using a much more compact word representation, and yielding many new state-of-the-art results.Comment: NAACL 201

Fully-unsupervised embeddings-based hypernym discovery

Funding: Supported in part by Sardegna Ricerche project OKgraph (CRP 120) and MIUR MIUR PRIN 2017 (2019-2022) project HOPE—High quality Open data Publishing and Enrichment.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Hypernym Detection Using Strict Partial Order Networks

This paper introduces Strict Partial Order Networks (SPON), a novel neural network architecture designed to enforce asymmetry and transitive properties as soft constraints. We apply it to induce hypernymy relations by training with is-a pairs. We also present an augmented variant of SPON that can generalize type information learned for in-vocabulary terms to previously unseen ones. An extensive evaluation over eleven benchmarks across different tasks shows that SPON consistently either outperforms or attains the state of the art on all but one of these benchmarks.Comment: 8 page

Inferring Concept Hierarchies from Text Corpora via Hyperbolic Embeddings

We consider the task of inferring is-a relationships from large text corpora. For this purpose, we propose a new method combining hyperbolic embeddings and Hearst patterns. This approach allows us to set appropriate constraints for inferring concept hierarchies from distributional contexts while also being able to predict missing is-a relationships and to correct wrong extractions. Moreover -- and in contrast with other methods -- the hierarchical nature of hyperbolic space allows us to learn highly efficient representations and to improve the taxonomic consistency of the inferred hierarchies. Experimentally, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several commonly-used benchmarks