Hypernymy relations from definiens-definiendum co-occurrence in multiple dictionary definitions

Resumen

We present a methodology based on co-occurrence statistics between
headwords and words in their definitions in order to derive hypernymy relations
from a lexicographic corpus, as part of a more extensive project devoted to the
creation of a general purpose Spanish ontology of nouns and its application to the
study of predicate-argument structures. The idea of the present proposal is to extract
these semantic relations using a statistical technique that allows to combine
diverse lexicographic resources. We find that hypernyms of a word are frequently
used in its definitions and, similarly, its hyponyms usually are those which have frequent
mentions to this word in their definitions. This creates a statistical association
between words that allows for a taxonomic structuring of a vocabulary. Preliminary
results show precision figures of of 71,57% in hypernyms and of 67,97% in hyponyms.