Taxonomy is not only a fundamental form of knowledge representation, but also crucial to vast knowledge-rich applications, such as question answering and web search. Most existing taxonomy construction methods extract hypernym-hyponym entity pairs to organize a universal taxonomy. However, these generic taxonomies cannot satisfy users specific interest in certain areas and relations. Moreover, the nature of instance taxonomy treats each node as a single word, which has low semantic coverage. In this paper, we propose a method for seed-guided topical taxonomy construction, which takes a corpus and a seed taxonomy described by concept names as input, and constructs a more complete taxonomy based on users interest, wherein each node is represented by a cluster of coherent terms. Our framework, CoRel, has two modules to fulfill this goal. A relation transferring module learns and transfers the users interested relation along multiple paths to expand the seed taxonomy structure in width and depth. A concept learning module enriches the semantics of each concept node by jointly embedding the taxonomy and text. Comprehensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets show that Corel generates high-quality topical taxonomies and outperforms all the baselines significantly.
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