The Automatic Extraction of Hypernyms and the Development of WordNet Prototype for Korean Nouns using Korean MRD (Machine Readable Dictionary)

When a human recognizes nouns in a sentence, s/he associates them with the hyper concepts of onus. For computer to simulate the human's word recognition, it should build the knowledge base (WordNet)for the hyper concepts of words. Until now, works for the WordNet haven't been performed in Korea, because they need lots of human efforts and time. But, as the power of computer is radically improved and common MRD becomes available, it is more feasible to automatically construct the WordNet. This paper proposes the method that automatically builds the WordNet of Korean nouns by using the descripti on of onus in Korean MRD, and it proposes the rules for extracting the hyper concepts (hypernyms)by analyzing structrual characteristics of Korean. The rules effect such characteristics as a headword lies on the rear part of sentences and the descriptive sentences of nouns have special structure. In addition, the WordNet prototype of Korean Nouns is developed, which is made by combining the hypernyms produced by the rules mentioned above. It extracts the hypernyms of about 2,500 sample words, and the result shows that about 92per cents of hypernyms are correct.