Synthesizing a large concept hierarchy from French hyperonyms

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The KAI,IPSOS prototype we have developed at the IBM Paris Scientific Center is able to analyze texts written in l;rcnch and to produce a semantic representalton of these texts expressed as a set of inter-related Conceptual Graphs [6, 1]. It uses a semantic lexicon which contains, for each word to bc defined, one or more Conceptual Graphs corre- sponding to one or nore meanings of tile word. The KAI,IPSOS question/answering system analyzes a Natural l.anguagc query, translates it into Conceptual Graphs, performs pattern matching and deductkin on tllesc text graphs to select tile answer, and finally generates a Natural I,an,magc answer fi'mn the selected answer graphs. We do not detail this KAI,IPSOS system here because many papers have already been published on it (see the references). We have chosen to prosera recent work [5] which has been done on building a large concept hierarchy from an existing published dictionary, More prcciscly, we have synthcsixcd a large sema