Automatic Construction of a Concept Hierarchy from Coordinated Noun Phrases

Noun phrase coordination is an extremely productive phenomenon. Based on an observation that conjuncts tend to denote semantically related concepts, we collect four hundred thousand pairs of conjuncts from the British National Corpus, in an attempt to build an is-a hierarchy of English noun concepts. The modifiedness patterns of the two words in these pairs point to three distinct semantic relations: sibling, cousin, and ancestor-or-ancestor' sibling. The process of finding them and how these pairs are used to motivate groups of quasi-synonyms and then to locate the hypernyms are discussed.