Hyponymy Patterns

We present below an experiment in which we identified in corpora hyponymy patterns for English and for Romanian in two different ways. Such an experiment is interesting both from a computational linguistic perspective and from a theoretical linguistic one. On the one hand, a set of hyponymy patterns is useful for the automatic creation or enrichment of an ontology, for tasks such as document indexing, information retrieval, question answering. On the other hand, these patterns can be used in papers concerned with this semantic relation (hyponymy) as they are more numerous and are evaluated as opposed to those "discovered" through observation of text or, rather, introspection. One can see how hyponymy is realized in text, according to the stylistic register to which this belongs, and also a comparison between such patterns in two different languages is made possible.