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A word A is a hypernym (in Greek υπερνύμιον, literally meaning 'extra name') of another word B if A's meaning encompasses the meaning of B, that is, if B is a kind of A.

For example, vehicle denotes all the things that are separately denoted by the words train, chariot, dogsled, airplane, and automobile and is therefore a hypernym of each of those words.

A hypernym is the opposite of a hyponym. For example, plant is hypernymic to flower whereas tulip is hyponymic to flower.

Hypernymy is the semantic relation in which one word is the hypernym of another. Hypernymy, the relation words stand in when their extensions stand in the relation of class to subclass, should not be confused with holonymy which is the relation words stand in when the things that they denote stand in the relation of whole to part. A similar warning applies to hyponymy and meronymy.

One of the first suggestions on how to find hypernym/hyponym pairs in a text came from Marti Hearst, who suggested looking at the output of a parser and taking all of the terms linked by constructions such as X and other Y; X could be considered a possible hyponym of Y. This method was extended by Snow et al, who developed an automated method of finding possible constructions that could signal such a pair.

Their process works by taking hypernym/hyponym pairs from WordNet and finding many noun-noun pairs from a parsed corpus. They train a classifier to select those pairs of words that have a high probability of being hypernym pairs given the constructions which link the terms in the corpus.

• Snow, Rion; Jurafsky, Daniel; Ng, Andrew Y.. Learning syntactic patterns for automatic hypernym discovery, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17, 2004 (Available online: PDF)

• M. Hearst. 1992. Automatic acquisition of hyponyms from large text corpora. In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

• -onym
• synonym
• WordNet (a semantic lexicon for the English language, which puts words in semantic relations to each other, mainly by using the concepts hypernym and hyponym.)