HyperLex: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Graded Lexical Entailment

Understand

We introduce HyperLex - a dataset and evaluation resource that quantifies the extent of of the semantic category membership, that is, type-of relation also known as hyponymy-hypernymy or lexical entailment (LE) relation between 2,616 concept pairs.

• Cognitive psychology research has established that typicality and category/class membership are computed in human semantic memory as a gradual rather than binary relation.
• Nevertheless, most NLP research, and existing large-scale invetories of concept category membership (WordNet, DBPedia, etc.) treat category membership and LE as binary.
• To address this, we asked hundreds of native English speakers to indicate typicality and strength of category membership between a diverse range of concept pairs on a crowdsourcing platform.