Inducing criteria for mass noun lexical mappings using the Cyc KB, and its extension to WordNet

This paper presents an automatic approach for learning semantic criteria for the mass versus count noun distinction by induction over the lexical mappings contained in the Cyc knowledge base. This produces accurate results (89.5%) using a decision tree that only incorporates semantic features (i.e., Cyc ontological types). Comparable results (86.9%) are obtained using OpenCyc, the publicly available version of Cyc. For broader applicability, the mass noun criteria using Cyc are converted into criteria using WordNet, preserving the general accuracy (86.3%).