Determining the specificity of nouns from text

Abstract

In this work, we use a large text corpus to order nouns by their level of specificity. This semantic information can for most nouns be determined with over 80% accuracy using simple statistics from a text corpus without using any additional sources of semantic knowledge. This kind of semantic information can be used to help in automatically constructing or augmenting a lexical database such as WordNet. 1 Introduction Large lexical databases such as WordNet (see Fellbaum (1998)) are in common research use. However, there are circumstances, particularly involving domainspecific text, where WordNet does not have sufficient coverage. Various automatic methods have been proposed to automatically build lexical resources or augment existing resources. (See, e.g., Riloff and Shepherd (1997), Roark and Charniak (1998), Caraballo (1999), and Berland and Charniak (1999).) In this paper, we describe a method which can be used to assist in this problem. We present here a way to determine the rela...