We present a new approach to extraction of hypernyms based on projection learning and word embeddings. In contrast to classification-based approaches, projection-based methods require no candidate hyponym-hypernym pairs. While it is natural to use both positive and negative training examples in supervised relation extraction, the impact of negative examples on hypernym prediction was not studied so far. In this paper, we show that explicit negative examples used for regularization of the model significantly improve performance compared to the state-of-the-art approach of (2014) on three datasets from different languages.
We introduce BLESS, a data set specifically designed for the evaluation of distributional semantic models. BLESS contains a set of tuples instantiating different, explicitly typed semantic relations, plus a number of controlled random tuples. It is thus possible to assess the ability of a model to detect truly related word pairs, as well as to perform in-depth analyses of the types of semantic relations that a model favors. We discuss the motivations for BLESS, describe its construction and structure, and present examples of its usage in the evaluation of distributional semantic models.