WordNet Hierarchy Axiomatization and the Mass–Count Distinction

Abstract—WordNet provides a semantic hierarchy with broad lexical coverage, which has proved suf�ciently precise to boost performance at many tasks involving natural language. However, it has not yet been formalized for use in a general reasoning system. In this paper, we present such a formalization. We use a semi-automatic annotation of WordNet with lexical features – most notably the mass–count distinction – to recognize inferentially different relations between concepts. The result is a collection of 77,263 lexical-semantic axioms, which are being released for general use. We evaluate a sample of the axioms for core concepts, showing their quality to be signi�cantly better than a baseline interpretation of WordNet. I