Learning Semantic Hierarchies Via Word Embeddings

Semantic hierarchy construction aims to build structures of concepts linked by hypernym-hyponym ("is-a") relations. A major challenge for this task is the automatic discovery of such relations. This paper proposes a novel and effective method for the construction of semantic hierarchies based on word embeddings, which can be used to measure the semantic relationship between words. We identify whether a candidate word pair has hypernym-hyponym relation by using the word-embedding-based semantic projections between words and their hypernyms. Our result, an F-score of 73.74%, outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on a manually labeled test dataset. Moreover, combining our method with a previous manually-built hierarchy extension method can further improve F-score to 80.29%.