Acquisition of hyponymy relations for agricultural terms from a Japanese statutory corpus

This paper,which aims to increment the vocabulary of an existing thesaurus using hyponymy relations,focuses on an agricultural thesaurus called AGROVOC.Our main goal is to acquire AGROVOC-qualified candidates from the hyponymy relations of legal texts and tables.We propose a pattern-based approach to hyponymy relation acquisition.Our experimental result showed that 222 and 868 candidates are extracted from statutory sentences with 67.1%precision and tables with 37.0%precision,respectively.