Learning Taxonomic Relations from Heterogeneous Evidence

We present a novel approach to the automatic acquisition of taxonomic relations. The main difference to earlier approaches is that we do not only consider one single source of evidence, i.e. a specific algorithm or approach, but examine the possibility of learning taxonomic relations by considering various and heterogeneous forms of evidence. In particular, we derive these different evidences by using well-known NLP techniques and resources and combine them via two simple strategies. Our approach shows very promising results compared to other results from the literature. The main aim of the work presented in this paper is (i) to gain insight into the behaviour of different approaches to learn taxonomic relations, (ii) to provide a first step towards combining these different approaches, and (iii) to establish a baseline for further research.