One embodiment of the present invention provides a method comprising receiving a text corpus, and generating a first list of triples based on the text corpus. Each triple of the first list comprises a first term representing a candidate hyponym, a second term representing a candidate hypernym, and a frequency value indicative of a number of times a hypernymy relation is observed between the candidate hyponym and the candidate hypernym in the text corpus. The method further comprises training a neural network for hypernym induction based on the first list. The trained neural network is a strict partial order network (SPON) model.