Combining syntactic patterns and Wikipedia's hierarchy of hyperlinks to extract meronym relations

We present here two methods for extraction o, meronymic relation : (a) the first one relies solely on syntactic information. Unlike other approaches based on simple patterns, we determine their optimal combination to extract word pairs linked via a given semantic relation; (b) the second approach consists in combining syntactic patterns with the semantic information extracted from the Wikipedia hyperlink hierarchy (WHH) of the constituent words. By comparing our work with SemEval 2007 (Task 4 test set) and WordNet (WN) we found that our system clearly outperforms its competitors.