Exploiting Hyponymy in Extracting Relations and Enhancing Ontologies

Relation extraction systems typically rely on local lexical and syntactic features as evidence. Recent work suggests that for a given relation, there might exist certain patterns which, if present in the graph of relationships between objects, provide additional evidence for that relation. While these relational patterns can be very useful, obtaining them on a per-relation basis can be difficult. We propose template relational patterns based on the hyponymy relation. These patterns are applicable for all relations. Existing resources like WordNet are a rich and reliable source of hyponymy relationships between entities. We present techniques for making use of these template patterns for extracting relationships and incorporating them into the ontology. Our experiments show performance improvements in both tasks.