HyperLex: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Graded Lexical Entailment

We introduce HyperLex - a dataset and evaluation resource that quantifies the extent of of the semantic category membership and lexical entailment (LE) relation between 2,616 concept pairs. Cognitive psychology research has established that category/class membership, and hence LE, is computed in human semantic memory as a gradual rather than binary relation. Nevertheless, most NLP research, and existing large-scale invetories of concept category membership (WordNet, DBPedia, etc.) treat category membership and LE as binary. To address this, we asked hundreds of native English speakers to indicate strength of category membership between a diverse range of concept pairs on a crowdsourcing platform. Our results confirm that category membership and LE are indeed more gradual than binary. We then compare these human judgements with the predictions of automatic systems, which reveals a huge gap between human performance and state-of-the-art LE, distributional and representation learning models, and substantial differences between the models themselves. We discuss a pathway for improving semantic models to overcome this discrepancy, and indicate future application areas for improved graded LE systems.