Expanding HiErarcHical contExts for constructing a sEmantic Word nEtWork

A semantic word network is a network that represents the semantic relations between individual words or their lexical senses. This paper proposes Watlink, an unsupervised method for inducing a semantic word network (SWN) by constructing and expanding the hierarchical contexts using both the available dictionary resources and distributional semantics’ methods for is-a relations. It has three steps: context construction, context expansion, and context disambiguation. The proposed method has been evaluated on two different datasets for the Russian language. The former is a wellknown lexical ontology built by the group of expert lexicographers. The latter, LRWC (“Lexical Relations from the Wisdom of the Crowd”), is a new resource created using crowdsourcing that contains both positive and negative human judgements for subsumptions. The proposed method outperformed the other relation extraction methods on both datasets according to recall and F1-score. Both the implementation of the Watlink method and the LRWC dataset are publicly available under libré licenses.