---
title: "Hearst Patterns Revisited — paper by Roller et al. (2018)"
description: "The paper asks whether classic Hearst-style lexico-syntactic patterns, often dismissed… 0.96 accuracy. 23 references, cited by 39 papers here."
authors: ["Stephen Roller", "Douwe Kiela", "Maximilian Nickel"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P18-2057/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/p18-2057"
arxiv: "1806.03191"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/roller-2018-hearst-patterns-revisited-automatic-hypernym/"
---
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# Hearst Patterns Revisited: Automatic Hypernym Detection from Large Text Corpora

**Authors:** [Stephen Roller](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/stephen-roller/), [Douwe Kiela](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/douwe-kiela/) and [Maximilian Nickel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/maximilian-nickel/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) ([ACL 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P18-2057/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P18-2057.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/p18-2057](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-2057) · [arXiv 1806.03191](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03191) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2798736886)

**Citations:** 104 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [39](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/roller-2018-hearst-patterns-revisited-automatic-hypernym/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks whether classic Hearst-style lexico-syntactic patterns, often dismissed as too sparse, can still compete with distributional methods based on the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis (DIH) for unsupervised hypernym detection. The authors mined is-a pairs from Gigaword and Wikipedia using a small set of hand-written patterns, with preprocessing done in CoreNLP 3.8.0. They scored candidate pairs in four ways: raw extraction probability, PPMI, and low-rank versions of both obtained via truncated SVD. The SVD variants infer missing pairs from similarities between words. These models were compared against Cosine, WeedsPrec, invCL and SLQS, all computed on a large dependency-based space built from UkWaC and Wikipedia. Across nine benchmarks covering detection, direction prediction and graded entailment, the pattern models won almost everywhere. The SVD-smoothed PPMI variant (spmi) was usually the strongest. The work matters because it shows that the tightly constrained contexts captured by patterns carry hypernymy signal that DIH measures miss, and that matrix factorization largely solves the sparsity problem.

## Key points
- The pattern corpus has roughly 4.5M pair matches in total, which reduce to 431K distinct pairs involving 243K distinct terms. The distributional baseline space covers 218K words over 732K context dimensions.
- Evaluation used three task types. Detection was measured with Average Precision on BLESS, EVAL, LEDS, SHWARTZ and WBLESS. Direction was measured with accuracy on BLESS, WBLESS and BIBLESS. Graded entailment was measured with Spearman ρ on HYPERLEX nouns.
- Gains in detection were large: spmi reached 0.76 AP on BLESS versus 0.19 for the best distributional measure, and 0.96 versus 0.69 on WBLESS.
- In direction prediction on BLESS, the SVD models reached 0.96 accuracy, surpassing even the supervised state-of-the-art model of Vulić and Mrkšić (2017). On HYPERLEX, the plain p(x, y) model achieved the best score (ρ = 0.62).
- Sparse pattern models struggled on SHWARTZ, which has a long tail of rare words, and on EVAL, which contains many verbs and adjectives that the patterns do not cover. Code is released as facebookresearch/hypernymysuite.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela and Maximilian Nickel. 2018. Hearst Patterns Revisited: Automatic Hypernym Detection from Large Text Corpora. Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{roller2018hearst,
  title = {{Hearst Patterns Revisited: Automatic Hypernym Detection from Large Text Corpora}},
  author = {Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela and Maximilian Nickel},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p18-2057},
  eprint = {1806.03191},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-2057}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 12 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*