KASSYS: a definition acquisition system in natural language

This paper is an introduction to KASSYS, a system that has been designed to extract information from defining statements in natural language. Only hyperonymous definitions are dealt with here, for which systematic processing has been devised and implemented in the initial version of the system. The paper describes how KASSYS builds a taxinomic hierarchy by extracting the hyperonyms from these definitions. It also explains the way in which the system can answer closed questions (yes/no), thus enabling the user to check very quickly that a definition has been assimilated correctly. The under-lying formalism is that of conceptual graphs, with which the reader is assumed to be familiar.