View source for Hearst, 1992

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=992154

== Abstract ==
We  describe  a  method  for  the  automatic  acquisition of  the  hyponymy  lexical  relation  from  unrestricted  text.  Two  goals  motivate  the  approach:  (i)  avoidance  of the  need  for  pre-encoded knowledge  and  (ii) applicability across  a  wide range of text.  We  identify a  set  of lexico-syntactic  patterns  that  are  easily  recognizable, that  occur frequently  and across text  genre boundaries, and  that indisputably indicate the lexical relation  of interest.  We describe  a method for discovering  these  patterns  and  suggest  that  other  lexical relations will  also be acquirable in  this way.  A subset of the  acquisition  algorithm is  implemented and  the results  are  used  to  attgment  and  critique  the  structure  of a  large hand-built  thesaurus.  Extensions  and applications to areas such as information retrieval are suggested.