Constructing a Lexicon of Relational Nouns

Abstract

Relational nouns refer to an entity by virtue of how it relates to another entity. Their identification in text is a prerequisite for the correct semantic interpretation of a sentence, and could be used to improve information extraction. Although various systems for extracting relations expressed using nouns have been developed, there are no dedicated lexical resources for relational nouns. We contribute a lexicon of 6,224 labeled nouns which includes 1,446 relational nouns. We describe the bootstrapped annotation of relational nouns, and develop a classifier that achieves 70.4% F1 when tested on held out nouns that are among the most common 2,500 word types in Gigaword. We make the lexicon and classifier available to the scientific community.