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# Automatic Thesaurus Construction for Modern Hebrew

**Authors:** [Chaya Liebeskind](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/chaya-liebeskind/); [Ido Dagan](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ido-dagan/); [Jonathan Schler](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/jonathan-schler/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Proceedings of LREC 2018 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L18-1229](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1229/) · library `lingbulk-2018-liebeskind-automatic-thesaurus-construction-modern-hebrew` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (ELRA, LREC proceedings) — summary only

[Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L18-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1229/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1229.pdf)

**Authors (3)**

1. Chaya Liebeskind
2. Ido Dagan
3. Jonathan Schler

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors build corpus-based thesauri for Modern Hebrew, a morphologically rich language where taggers and parsers are weak. They use four newspaper and parliamentary corpora (about 42 million tokens in total), a list of 3,362 target terms from Hebrew WordNet with at least five occurrences, and a co-occurrence method (PMI, window of three words on each side, top 50 terms grouped by lemma variants). They compare three levels of term representation (surface form, best lemma from a tagger with about 90% accuracy, and all lemmas), in nine first-order configurations and, with a distributional second-order method, in 27 configurations. The gold standard is Hebrew WordNet, which has low coverage, so a manual evaluation was added. The best first-order setting takes the surface form as candidate and groups variants into lemma clusters afterwards; the default best-lemma setting is significantly worse (p < 0.01). The conclusion is that the usual choose-the-lemma-first pipeline is not optimal for Hebrew.

## Ideas

- I1. Count surface forms first and fold morphological variants into lemma groups after ranking, instead of choosing a lemma for each token. This is the "resolve in retrospect" option, and it avoids the tagger error that the paper measures.
- I2. Measure any induced Hebrew lexical relation with the paper's two scores, relative recall and mean average precision, against a gold list. The gold must be a resource whose licence allows testing (see [Data and model licences](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/licence/DATA/)).
- I3. Use a second-order (distributional) similarity only as a test of the lexicon, never as part of the parser, since Mova is rule-based. The paper's lesson for that test is that the comparison is only meaningful with the same term representation on both sides.

## For Mova

I1 goes into [8. Lexicon and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/08-lexicon-register/) as a note on how to build a Hebrew lexicon before the tagger is trusted. I2 and I3 are measurements to run for the Hebrew lexicon. No code is taken from this paper, and the text may not be carried into a release.

Topics: [Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/)

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{liebeskind2018automatic,
  title = {{Automatic Thesaurus Construction for Modern Hebrew}},
  author = {Liebeskind, Chaya and Dagan, Ido and Schler, Jonathan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)},
  year = {2018},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L18-1229/}
}
```

- [← previous Missing objects in Hebrew: Argument ellipsis, not VP ellipsis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2018-landau-missing-objects-hebrew-argument-ellipsis/)
- [next → Reciprocal expressions and the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2018-poortman-reciprocal-expressions-maximal-typicality-hypothesis/)
- [↑ back to Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/)

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