QASSIT: A Pretopological Framework for the Automatic Construction of Lexical Taxonomies from Raw Texts

This paper presents our participation to the SemEval Task-17, related to “Taxonomy Extraction Evaluation” (Bordea et al., 2015). We propose a new methodology for semisupervised and auto-supervised acquisition of lexical taxonomies from raw texts. Our approach is based on the theory of pretopology which offers a powerful formalism to model subsumption relations and transforms a list of terms into a structured term space by combining different discriminant criteria. In order to reach a good pretopological space, we define the Learning Pretopological Spaces method that learns a parameterized space by using an evolutionary strategy.