A Taxonomy of Spanish Nouns, a Statistical Algorithm to Generate it and its Implementation in Open Source Code

Rogelio Nazar, Irene Renau


Abstract
In this paper we describe our work in progress in the automatic development of a taxonomy of Spanish nouns, we offer the Perl implementation we have so far, and we discuss the different problems that still need to be addressed. We designed a statistically-based taxonomy induction algorithm consisting of a combination of different strategies not involving explicit linguistic knowledge. Being all quantitative, the strategies we present are however of different nature. Some of them are based on the computation of distributional similarity coefficients which identify pairs of sibling words or co-hyponyms, while others are based on asymmetric co-occurrence and identify pairs of parent-child words or hypernym-hyponym relations. A decision making process is then applied to combine the results of the previous steps, and finally connect lexical units to a basic structure containing the most general categories of the language. We evaluate the quality of the taxonomy both manually and also using Spanish Wordnet as a gold-standard. We estimate an average of 89.07% precision and 25.49% recall considering only the results which the algorithm presents with high degree of certainty, or 77.86% precision and 33.72% recall considering all results.
Anthology ID:
L16-1236
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1485–1492
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1236
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rogelio Nazar and Irene Renau. 2016. A Taxonomy of Spanish Nouns, a Statistical Algorithm to Generate it and its Implementation in Open Source Code. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1485–1492, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Taxonomy of Spanish Nouns, a Statistical Algorithm to Generate it and its Implementation in Open Source Code (Nazar & Renau, LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1236.pdf