Why we have switched from building full-fledged taxonomies to simply detecting hypernymy relations

Understand

The study of taxonomies and hypernymy relations has been extensive on the Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature.

• However, the evaluation of taxonomy learning approaches has been traditionally troublesome, as it mainly relies on ad-hoc experiments which are hardly reproducible and manually expensive.
• Partly because of this, current research has been lately focusing on the hypernymy detection task.
• In this paper we reflect on this trend, analyzing issues related to current evaluation procedures.