Every Child Should Have Parents: A Taxonomy Refinement Algorithm Based on Hyperbolic Term Embeddings

Rami Aly, Shantanu Acharya, Alexander Ossa, Arne Köhn, Chris Biemann, Alexander Panchenko

Abstract: We introduce the use of Poincaré embeddings to improve existing state-of-the-art approaches to domain-specific taxonomy induction from text as a signal for both relocating wrong hyponym terms within a (pre-induced) taxonomy as well as for attaching disconnected terms in a taxonomy. This method substantially improves previous state-of-the-art results on the SemEval-2016 Task 13 on taxonomy extraction. We demonstrate the superiority of Poincaré embeddings over distributional semantic representations, supporting the hypothesis that they can better capture hierarchical lexical-semantic relationships than embeddings in the Euclidean space.