Automatic Acquisition and Expansion of Hypernym Links

Recent developments in computational terminology call for the design of multiple and complementary tools for the acquisition, the structuring and the exploitation of terminological data. This paper proposes to bridge the gap between term acquisition and thesaurus construction by offering a framework for automatic structuring of multi-word candidate terms with the help of corpus-based links between single-word terms. First, we present a system for corpus-based acquisition of terminological relationships through discursive patterns. This system is built on previous work on automatic extraction of hyponymy links through shallow parsing. Second, we show how hypernym links between single-word terms can be extended to semantic links between multi-word terms through corpus-based extraction of semantic variants. The induced hierarchy is incomplete but provides an automatic generalization of single-word terms relations to multi-word terms that are pervasive in technical thesauri and corpora.