Extraction of Hyponymic Relations in French with Knowledge-Pattern-Based Word Sketches

Hyponymy is the cornerstone of taxonomies and concept hierarchies. However, the extraction of hypernym-hyponym pairs from a corpus can be time-consuming, and reconstructing the hierarchical network of a domain is often an extremely complex process. This paper presents the development and evaluation of the French EcoLexicon Semantic Sketch Grammar (ESSG-fr), a French hyponymic sketch grammar for Sketch Engine based on knowledge patterns. It offers a user-friendly way of extracting hyponymic pairs in the form of word sketches in any user-owned corpus. The ESSG-fr contains three times more hyponymic patterns than its English counterpart and has been tested in a multidisciplinary corpus. It is thus expected to be domain-independent. Moreover, the following methodological innovations have been included in its development: (1) use of English hyponymic patterns in a parallel corpus to find new French patterns; (2) automatic inclusion of the results of the Sketch Engine thesaurus to find new variants of the patterns. As for its evaluation, the ESSG-fr returns 70{\%} valid hyperonyms and hyponyms, measured on 180 extracted pairs of terms in three different domains.