Pattern-Based Distinction of Paradigmatic Relations for German Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives

This paper implements a simple vector space model relying on lexico-syntactic patterns to distinguish between the paradigmatic relations synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy. Our study is performed across word classes, and models the lexical relations between German nouns, verbs and adjectives. Applying nearest-centroid classification to the relation vectors, we achieve a precision of 59.80%, which significantly outperforms the majority baseline (χ, p<0.05). The best results rely on large-scale, noisy patterns, without significant improvements from various pattern generalisations and reliability filters. Analysing the classification shows that (i) antonym/synonym distinction is performed significantly better than synonym/hypernym distinction, and (ii) that paradigmatic relations between verbs are more difficult to predict than paradigmatic relations between nouns or adjectives.