Specifying Hyponymy Subtypes and Knowledge Patterns:a corpus-based study

Resumen

The organization of a terminological knowledge base (TKB) relies on the identification of relations between concepts. This involves making an inventory of semantic relations and extracting these relations from a corpus by means of knowledge patterns (KPs). In EcoLexicon, a multilingual and multimodal TKB on the environment, 17 semantic relations are currently being used to link environmental concepts. These relations include six subtypes of meronymy, but only one subtype of hyponymy ( type_of ). However, a recent pilot study (Gil-Berrozpe et al., in press) showed that the generic-specific relation could also be subdivided. Interestingly, these preliminary results indicated that hyponymy subtypes were constrained by the ontological nature of concepts, depending on whether they were entities or processes. The new proposal presented in this paper expands the scope of our preliminary research on hyponymy subtypes to include conc epts belonging to a wider range of semantic categories, and examines the behavior of knowledge patterns used to extract hyponymic relations. In this research, corpus analysis was used to explore the correlation of concepts in many different categories with KPs as well as with hyponymy subtypes. Thanks to these constraints, it was possible to formulate a more comprehensive inventory of generic-specific relations in the environmental domain.