A rule-based meronymy extraction module for Portuguese

In this article, we improve the extraction of semantic relations between textual elements as it is currently performed by STRING, a hybrid statistical and rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) chain for Portuguese, by targeting wholepart relation (meronymy), that is, a semantic relation between two entities of which one is perceived as a constituent part of the other, or between a set and its member. In this case, we focus on the type of meronymy involving human entities and body-part nouns (Nbp) (e.g., O Pedro partiu uma perna 'Pedro broke a leg': WHOLE-PART(Pedro,perna) 'WHOLE-PART(Pedro,leg)'). In order to extract this type of whole-part relations, a rule-based meronymy extraction module has been built and integrated in the grammar of the STRING system. The module was evaluated with promising results.