%0 Conference Paper
%1 hearst1992automatic
%A Hearst, Marti A.
%B Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics
%C Stroudsburg, PA, USA
%D 1992
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%K corpus hearst learning linguistics ontology pattern text
%P 539--545
%T Automatic acquisition of hyponyms from large text corpora
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.3115/992133.992154
%V 2
%X We describe a method for the automatic acquisition of the hyponymy lexical relation from unrestricted text. Two goals motivate the approach: (i) avoidance of the need for pre-encoded knowledge and (ii) applicability across a wide range of text. We identify a set of lexico-syntactic patterns that are easily recognizable, that occur frequently and across text genre boundaries, and that indisputably indicate the lexical relation of interest. We describe a method for discovering these patterns and suggest that other lexical relations will also be acquirable in this way. A subset of the acquisition algorithm is implemented and the results are used to augment and critique the structure of a large hand-built thesaurus. Extensions and applications to areas such as information retrieval are suggested.