Evaluation of Automatic Hypernym Extraction from Technical Corpora in English and Dutch

In this research, we evaluate different approaches for the automatic extraction of hypernym relations from English and Dutch technical text. The detected hypernym relations should enable us to semantically structure automatically obtained term lists from domain-and user-specific data. We investigated three different hypernymy extraction approaches for Dutch and English: a lexico-syntactic pattern-based approach, a distributional model and a morpho-syntactic method. To test the performance of the different approaches on domain-specific data, we collected and manually annotated English and Dutch data from two technical domains, viz. the dredging and financial domain. The experimental results show that especially the morpho-syntactic approach obtains good results for automatic hypernym extraction from technical and domain-specific texts.