This paper describes a method for extracting hyponyms from free text. In particular it explores two main matters. On the one hand, the possibility of reaching favorable results using only lexical extraction patterns. On the other hand, the usefulness of measuring the instance’s confidences based on the pattern’s confidences, and vice versa. Experimental results are encouraging because they show that the proposed method can be a practical high-precision approach for extracting hyponyms for a given set of concepts.