Semantic Bootstrapping: A Theoretical Perspective

Knowledge acquisition is an iterative process. Most prior work used syntactic bootstrapping approaches, while semantic bootstrapping was proposed recently. Unlike syntactic bootstrapping, semantic bootstrapping bootstraps directly on knowledge rather than on syntactic patterns, that is, it uses existing knowledge to understand the text and acquire more knowledge. It has been shown that semantic bootstrapping can achieve superb precision while retaining good recall on extracting isA relation. Nonetheless, the working mechanism of semantc bootstrapping remains elusive. In this extended abstract, we present a theoretical analysis as well as an experimental study to provide deeper insights into semantic bootstrapping.