Natural Language Processing · TEE · papers

Q1C · Hyponymy, hypernymy and WSD

Solved final paper · December 2025

Actual final examination · 2 December 2025 · 100 marks · 3 hours

Question. Define hyponymy and hypernymy with suitable linguistic examples. How can hypernymy be applied in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to resolve the correct meaning of polysemous words? Provide an example? [5 marks]

Answer

Hyponymy is the “is-a-kind-of” relation from a specific concept to a broader concept. Hypernymy is the inverse relation from the broader concept to the specific one. “Rose” is a hyponym of “flower”; “flower” is a hypernym of “rose”.

rose / tulip flower plant

The arrow points towards a broader category. Hyponymy is not a part–whole relation: a wheel is part of a car, but it is not a kind of car.

Using the hierarchy for WSD

WSD selects the intended sense of a word from its context. Obtain candidate senses from a lexical resource such as WordNet, inspect their hypernym chains, and favour the chain most compatible with nearby words.

  1. Sentence: “The mouse clicked the icon.”
  2. Candidate 1: mouse → rodent → mammal → animal. Candidate 2: mouse → pointing device → computer peripheral.
  3. The context words “clicked” and “icon” belong to the computer-use domain. They support the device hierarchy, rather than the animal hierarchy.
  4. Select the computer-pointing-device sense. In “The mouse ate cheese,” the animal hierarchy is more compatible.

Hypernym evidence supplies semantic generalisation; it is a useful signal rather than a guarantee, because short or unusual contexts may still be ambiguous.

Yaad rakho: Hyponym specific hai; hypernym uska bada category hai.