Taxonomy Induction Using Hierarchical Random Graphs

This paper presents a novel approach for inducing lexical taxonomies automatically from text. We recast the learning problem as that of inferring a hierarchy from a graph whose nodes represent taxonomic terms and edges their degree of relatedness. Our model takes this graph representation as input and fits a taxonomy to it via combination of a maximum likelihood approach with a Monte Carlo Sampling algorithm. Essentially, the method works by sampling hierarchical structures with probability proportional to the likelihood with which they produce the input graph. We use our model to infer a taxonomy over 541 nouns and show that it outperforms popular flat and hierarchical clustering algorithms.