Learning Taxonomies of Concepts and not Words using Contextualized Word Representations: A Position Paper

Taxonomies are semantic hierarchies of concepts. One limitation of current taxonomy learning systems is that they define concepts as single words. This position paper argues that contextualized word representations, which recently achieved state-of-the-art results on many competitive NLP tasks, are a promising method to address this limitation. We outline a novel approach for taxonomy learning that (1) defines concepts as synsets, (2) learns density-based approximations of contextualized word representations, and (3) can measure similarity and hypernymy among them.