Incorporating Trustiness and Collective Synonym/Contrastive Evidence into Taxonomy Construction

Taxonomy plays an important role in many applications by organizing domain knowledge into a hierarchy of is-a relations between terms. Previous works on the taxonomic relation identification from text corpora lack in two aspects: 1) They do not consider the trustiness of individual source texts, which is important to filter out incorrect relations from unreliable sources. 2) They also do not consider collective evidence from synonyms and contrastive terms, where synonyms may provide additional supports to taxonomic relations, while contrastive terms may contradict them. In this paper, we present a method of taxonomic relation identification that incorporates the trustiness of source texts measured with such techniques as PageRank and knowledge-based trust, and the collective evidence of synonyms and contrastive terms identified by linguistic pattern matching and machine learning. The experimental results show that the proposed features can consistently improve performance up to 4%-10% of F-measure.