Identifying 1950s American Jazz Musicians: Fine-Grained IsA Extraction via Modifier Composition

We present a method for populating fine-grained classes (e.g., “1950s American jazz musicians”) with instances (e.g., Charles Mingus). While stateof-the-art methods tend to treat class labels as single lexical units, the proposed method considers each of the individual modifiers in the class label relative to the head. An evaluation on the task of reconstructing Wikipedia category pages demonstrates a >10 point increase in AUC, over a strong baseline relying on widely-used Hearst patterns.