Drilling Lexico-Semantic Knowledge in Portuguese from BERT

We compiled a set of patterns that denote lexico-semantic relations in Portuguese, created templates where one argument is fixed and the other is replaced by a mask, and then used BERT for predicting the latter. For most relations and measures, when assessed in a test of lexico-semantic analogies, BERT predictions outperformed those of earlier methods computed from static word embeddings, either with a pattern alone or with a combination of patterns. There is still a large margin of progression, but this suggests that BERT can be used as a source of lexico-semantic knowledge in Portuguese.