This research work deals with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and extraction of essential information in an explicit form. The most common among the information management strategies is Document Retrieval (DR) and Information Filtering. DR systems may work as combine harvesters, which bring back useful material from the vast fields of raw material. With large amount of potentially useful information in hand, an Information Extraction (IE) system can then transform the raw material by refining and reducing it to a germ of original text. A Document Retrieval system collects the relevant documents carrying the required information, from the repository of texts. An IE system then transforms them into information that is more readily digested and analyzed. It isolates relevant text fragments, extracts relevant information from the fragments, and then arranges together the targeted information in a coherent framework. The thesis presents a new approach for Word Sense Disambiguation using thesaurus. The illustrative examples supports the effectiveness of this approach for speedy and effective disambiguation. A Document Retrieval method, based on Fuzzy Logic has been described and its application is illustrated. A question-answering system describes the operation of information extraction from the retrieved text documents. The process of information extraction for answering a query is considerably simplified by using a Structured Description Language (SDL) which is based on cardinals of queries in the form of who, what, when, where and why. The thesis concludes with the presentation of a novel strategy based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidential reasoning, for document retrieval and information extraction. This strategy permits relaxation of many limitations, which are inherent in Bayesian probabilistic approach.
Abbreviations often have several distinct meanings, often making their use in text ambiguous. Expanding them to their intended meaning in context is important for Machine Reading tasks such as document search, recommendation and question answering. Existing approaches mostly rely on manually labeled examples of abbreviations and their correct long-forms. Such data sets are costly to create and result in trained models with limited applicability and flexibility. Importantly, most current methods must be subjected to a full empirical evaluation in order to understand their limitations, which is …
Birmingham City University(伯明翰城市大学);University of Wolverhampton(伍尔弗汉普顿大学)
Identifying whether a word carries the same meaning or different meaning in two contexts is an important research area in natural language processing which plays a significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisation, information retrieval and information extraction. Most of the previous work in this area rely on language-specific resources making it difficult to generalise across languages. Considering this limitation, our approach to SemEval-2021 Task 2 is based only on pretrained transformer models and does not use any language-specific processing and res…
University of Bonn(波恩大学);Fraunhofer IAIS(弗劳恩霍夫应用信息技术研究所);Ruhr University Bochum(波鸿鲁尔大学)
Entity linking - connecting entity mentions in a natural language utterance to knowledge graph (KG) entities is a crucial step for question answering over KGs. It is often based on measuring the string similarity between the entity label and its mention in the question. The relation referred to in the question can help to disambiguate between entities with the same label. This can be misleading if an incorrect relation has been identified in the relation linking step. However, an incorrect relation may still be semantically similar to the relation in which the correct entity forms a triple wit…
Islamic Science University of Malaysia(马来西亚伊斯兰科学大学);Zarqa University(扎尔卡大学)
Question processing is a fundamental step in a question answering (QA) application, and its quality impacts the performance of QA application. The major challenging issue in processing question is how to extract semantic of natural language questions (NLQs). A human language is ambiguous. Ambiguity may occur at two levels; lexical and syntactic. In this paper, we propose a new approach for resolving lexical ambiguity problem by integrating context knowledge and concepts knowledge of a domain, into shallow natural language processing (SNLP) techniques. Concepts knowledge is modeled using ontolo…
Prepositions are frequently occurring polysemous words. Disambiguation of prepositions is crucial in tasks like semantic role labelling, question answering, text entailment, and noun compound paraphrasing. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for preposition sense disambiguation (PSD), which does not use any linguistic tools. In a supervised setting, the machine learning model is presented with sentences wherein prepositions have been annotated with senses. These senses are IDs in what is called The Preposition Project (TPP). We use the hidden layer representations from pre-trained BE…
The paper presents a method for word sense disambiguation based on parallel corpora. The method exploits recent advances in word alignment and word clustering based on automatic extraction of translation equivalents and being supported by available aligned wordnets for the languages in the corpus. The wordnets are aligned to the Princeton Wordnet, according to the principles established by EuroWordNet. The evaluation of the WSD system, implementing the method described herein showed very encouraging results. The same system used in a validation mode, can be used to check and spot alignment err…
In the paper, we test two different approaches to the {unsupervised} word sense disambiguation task for Polish. In both methods, we use neural language models to predict words similar to those being disambiguated and, on the basis of these words, we predict the partition of word senses in different ways. In the first method, we cluster selected similar words, while in the second, we cluster vectors representing their subsets. The evaluation was carried out on texts annotated with plWordNet senses and provided a relatively good result (F1=0.68 for all ambiguous words). The results are significa…
In this paper, I propose a novel word sense disambiguation method based on the global co-occurrence information using NMF. When I calculate the dependency relation matrix, the existing method tends to produce very sparse co-occurrence matrix from a small training set. Therefore, the NMF algorithm sometimes does not converge to desired solutions. To obtain a large number of co-occurrence relations, I propose to use co-occurrence frequencies of dependency relations between word features in the whole training set. This enables us to solve data sparseness problem and induce more effective latent f…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task to determine the sense of an ambiguous word in a given context. Previous approaches for WSD have focused on supervised and knowledge-based methods, but inter-sense interactions patterns or regularities for disambiguation remain to be found. We argue the following cause as one of the major difficulties behind finding the right patterns: for a particular context, the intended senses of a sequence of ambiguous words are dependent on each other, i.e. the choice of one word's sense is associated with the choice of another word's sense, making WSD a combin…
TU WIEN(维也纳工业大学);Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)(西班牙国家远程教育大学)
We explore the use of unsupervised methods in Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation (CL-WSD) with the application of English to Persian. Our proposed approach targets the languages with scarce resources (low-density) by exploiting word embedding and semantic similarity of the words in context. We evaluate the approach on a recent evaluation benchmark and compare it with the state-of-the-art unsupervised system (CO-Graph). The results show that our approach outperforms both the standard baseline and the CO-Graph system in both of the task evaluation metrics (Out-Of-Five and Best result).
Southern Methodist University(南卫理公会大学);Drake University(德雷克大学);University of Arkansas(阿肯色大学)
This dissertation presents several new methods of supervised and unsupervised learning of word sense disambiguation models. The supervised methods focus on performing model searches through a space of probabilistic models, and the unsupervised methods rely on the use of Gibbs Sampling and the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. In both the supervised and unsupervised case, the Naive Bayesian model is found to perform well. An explanation for this success is presented in terms of learning rates and bias-variance decompositions.
In this paper Schapire and Singer's AdaBoost.MH boosting algorithm is applied to the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) problem. Initial experiments on a set of 15 selected polysemous words show that the boosting approach surpasses Naive Bayes and Exemplar-based approaches, which represent state-of-the-art accuracy on supervised WSD. In order to make boosting practical for a real learning domain of thousands of words, several ways of accelerating the algorithm by reducing the feature space are studied. The best variant, which we call LazyBoosting, is tested on the largest sense-tagged corpus avai…
We propose to take on the problem ofWord Sense Disambiguation (WSD). In language, words of the same form can take different meanings depending on context. While humans easily infer the meaning or gloss of such words by their context, machines stumble on this task.As such, we intend to replicated and expand upon the results of Huang et al.GlossBERT, a model which they design to disambiguate these words (Huang et al.,2019). Specifically, we propose the following augmentations: data-set tweaking(alpha hyper-parameter), ensemble methods, and replacement of BERT with BART andALBERT. The following G…
This paper describes a set of comparative experiments, including cross-corpus evaluation, between five alternative algorithms for supervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), namely Naive Bayes, Exemplar-based learning, SNoW, Decision Lists, and Boosting. Two main conclusions can be drawn: 1) The LazyBoosting algorithm outperforms the other four state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and ability to tune to new domains; 2) The domain dependence of WSD systems seems very strong and suggests that some kind of adaptation or tuning is required for cross-corpus application.
University of Wuppertal(伍珀塔尔大学);University of Konstanz(康斯坦茨大学)
We present two supervised (pre-)training methods to incorporate gloss definitions from lexical resources into neural language models (LMs). The training improves our models' performance for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) but also benefits general language understanding tasks while adding almost no parameters. We evaluate our techniques with seven different neural LMs and find that XLNet is more suitable for WSD than BERT. Our best-performing methods exceeds state-of-the-art WSD techniques on the SemCor 3.0 dataset by 0.5% F1 and increase BERT's performance on the GLUE benchmark by 1.1% on ave…
In this paper we present a clean, yet effective, model for word sense disambiguation. Our approach leverage a bidirectional long short-term memory network which is shared between all words. This enables the model to share statistical strength and to scale well with vocabulary size. The model is trained end-to-end, directly from the raw text to sense labels, and makes effective use of word order. We evaluate our approach on two standard datasets, using identical hyperparameter settings, which are in turn tuned on a third set of held out data. We employ no external resources (e.g. knowledge grap…
This work is a study of the impact of multiple aspects in a classic unsupervised word sense disambiguation algorithm. We identify relevant factors in a decision rule algorithm, including the initial labeling of examples, the formalization of the rule confidence, and the criteria for accepting a decision rule. Some of these factors are only implicitly considered in the original literature. We then propose a lightly supervised version of the algorithm, and employ a pseudo-word-based strategy to evaluate the impact of these factors. The obtained performances are comparable with those of highly op…
This article describes the results of a systematic in-depth study of the criteria used for word sense disambiguation. Our study is based on 60 target words: 20 nouns, 20 adjectives and 20 verbs. Our results are not always in line with some practices in the field. For example, we show that omitting non-content words decreases performance and that bigrams yield better results than unigrams.
We explore many ways of using conceptual distance measures in Word Sense Disambiguation, starting with the Agirre-Rigau conceptual density measure. We use a generalized form of this measure, introducing many (parameterized) refinements and performing an exhaustive evaluation of all meaningful combinations. We finally obtain a 42% improvement over the original algorithm, and show that measures of conceptual distance are not worse indicators for sense disambiguation than measures based on word-coocurrence (exemplified by the Lesk algorithm). Our results, however, reinforce the idea that only a c…
University of Louisiana at Lafayette(路易斯安那大学拉法叶分校);Stanford University School of Medicine(斯坦福大学医学院)
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods identify the most suitable meaning of a word with respect to the usage of that word in a specific context. Neural network-based WSD approaches rely on a sense-annotated corpus since they do not utilize lexical resources. In this study, we utilize both context and related gloss information of a target word to model the semantic relationship between the word and the set of glosses. We propose SensPick, a type of stacked bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to perform the WSD task. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that SensPick outper…
This paper describes a hybrid system for WSD, presented to the English all-words and lexical-sample tasks, that relies on two different unsupervised approaches. The first one selects the senses according to mutual information proximity between a context word a variant of the sense. The second heuristic analyzes the examples of use in the glosses of the senses so that simple syntactic patterns are inferred. This patterns are matched against the disambiguation contexts. We show that the first heuristic obtains a precision and recall of .58 and .35 respectively in the all words task while the sec…
A large class of unsupervised algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is that of dictionary-based methods. Various algorithms have as the root Lesk's algorithm, which exploits the sense definitions in the dictionary directly. Our approach uses the lexical base WordNet for a new algorithm originated in Lesk's, namely "chain algorithm for disambiguation of all words", CHAD. We show how translation from a language into another one and also text entailment verification could be accomplished by this disambiguation.
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学);University of Western Sydney(西悉尼大学);Massey University(梅西大学)
We propose KDSL, a new word sense disambiguation (WSD) framework that utilizes knowledge to automatically generate sense-labeled data for supervised learning. First, from WordNet, we automatically construct a semantic knowledge base called DisDict, which provides refined feature words that highlight the differences among word senses, i.e., synsets. Second, we automatically generate new sense-labeled data by DisDict from unlabeled corpora. Third, these generated data, together with manually labeled data and unlabeled data, are fed to a neural framework conducting supervised and unsupervised lea…
This paper presents the PALI team's winning system for SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation. We fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa model to solve the task of word in context disambiguation, i.e., to determine whether the target word in the two contexts contains the same meaning or not. In the implementation, we first specifically design an input tag to emphasize the target word in the contexts. Second, we construct a new vector on the fine-tuned embeddings from XLM-RoBERTa and feed it to a fully-connected network to output the probability of whether the target …
This paper compares the tasks of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and word-sense-tagging or disambiguation (WSD), and argues that the tasks are not related by fineness of grain or anything like that, but are quite different kinds of task, particularly becuase there is nothing in POS corresponding to sense novelty. The paper also argues for the reintegration of sub-tasks that are being separated for evaluation
University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学);University of Amsterdam(阿姆斯特丹大学);University of Zurich(苏黎世大学)
Word sense disambiguation is a well-known source of translation errors in NMT. We posit that some of the incorrect disambiguation choices are due to models' over-reliance on dataset artifacts found in training data, specifically superficial word co-occurrences, rather than a deeper understanding of the source text. We introduce a method for the prediction of disambiguation errors based on statistical data properties, demonstrating its effectiveness across several domains and model types. Moreover, we develop a simple adversarial attack strategy that minimally perturbs sentences in order to eli…
Word sense disambiguation helps identifying the proper sense of ambiguous words in text. With large terminologies such as the UMLS Metathesaurus ambiguities appear and highly effective disambiguation methods are required. Supervised learning algorithm methods are used as one of the approaches to perform disambiguation. Features extracted from the context of an ambiguous word are used to identify the proper sense of such a word. The type of features have an impact on machine learning methods, thus affect disambiguation performance. In this work, we have evaluated several types of features deriv…
Word sense disambiguation algorithms, with few exceptions, have made use of only one lexical knowledge source. We describe a system which performs unrestricted word sense disambiguation (on all content words in free text) by combining different knowledge sources: semantic preferences, dictionary definitions and subject/domain codes along with part-of-speech tags. The usefulness of these sources is optimised by means of a learning algorithm. We also describe the creation of a new sense tagged corpus by combining existing resources. Tested accuracy of our approach on this corpus exceeds 92%, dem…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), which aims to identify the correct sense of a given polyseme, is a long-standing problem in NLP. In this paper, we propose to use BERT to extract better polyseme representations for WSD and explore several ways of combining BERT and the classifier. We also utilize sense definitions to train a unified classifier for all words, which enables the model to disambiguate unseen polysemes. Experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on the standard English All-word WSD evaluation.
Meaning of words constantly changes given the events in modern civilization. Large Language Models use word embeddings, which are often static and thus cannot cope with this semantic change. Thus,it is important to resolve ambiguity in word meanings. This paper is an effort in this direction, where we explore methods for word sense disambiguation for the EvoNLP shared task. We conduct rigorous ablations for two solutions to this problem. We see that an approach using time-aware language models helps this task. Furthermore, we explore possible future directions to this problem.
This paper presents a set of experiments to evaluate and compare between the performance of using CBOW Word2Vec and Lemma2Vec models for Arabic Word-in-Context (WiC) disambiguation without using sense inventories or sense embeddings. As part of the SemEval-2021 Shared Task 2 on WiC disambiguation, we used the dev.ar-ar dataset (2k sentence pairs) to decide whether two words in a given sentence pair carry the same meaning. We used two Word2Vec models: Wiki-CBOW, a pre-trained model on Arabic Wikipedia, and another model we trained on large Arabic corpora of about 3 billion tokens. Two Lemma2Vec…
European Centre for Living Technology(欧洲生活技术中心);Ca’ Foscari University of Venice(威尼斯大学)
This paper presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are represented as classes. The words simultaneously update their class membership preferences according to the senses that neighboring words are likely to choose. We use distributional information to weigh the influence that each word has on the decisions of the others and semantic similarity information to measure the strength of compatibility among the choices. Wi…
University of Oslo(奥斯陆大学);University of Trento(特伦托大学)
We critically evaluate the widespread assumption that deep learning NLP models do not require lemmatized input. To test this, we trained versions of contextualised word embedding ELMo models on raw tokenized corpora and on the corpora with word tokens replaced by their lemmas. Then, these models were evaluated on the word sense disambiguation task. This was done for the English and Russian languages. The experiments showed that while lemmatization is indeed not necessary for English, the situation is different for Russian. It seems that for rich-morphology languages, using lemmatized training …
This paper describes the National Research Council (NRC) Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) system, as applied to the English Lexical Sample (ELS) task in Senseval-3. The NRC system approaches WSD as a classical supervised machine learning problem, using familiar tools such as the Weka machine learning software and Brill's rule-based part-of-speech tagger. Head words are represented as feature vectors with several hundred features. Approximately half of the features are syntactic and the other half are semantic. The main novelty in the system is the method for generating the semantic features, ba…
This paper presents a corpus-based approach to word sense disambiguation that builds an ensemble of Naive Bayesian classifiers, each of which is based on lexical features that represent co--occurring words in varying sized windows of context. Despite the simplicity of this approach, empirical results disambiguating the widely studied nouns line and interest show that such an ensemble achieves accuracy rivaling the best previously published results.
Recently, Yuan et al. (2016) have shown the effectiveness of using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for performing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Their proposed technique outperformed the previous state-of-the-art with several benchmarks, but neither the training data nor the source code was released. This paper presents the results of a reproduction study of this technique using only openly available datasets (GigaWord, SemCore, OMSTI) and software (TensorFlow). From them, it emerged that state-of-the-art results can be obtained with much less data than hinted by Yuan et al. All code and train…
Disambiguation of word senses in context is easy for humans, but is a major challenge for automatic approaches. Sophisticated supervised and knowledge-based models were developed to solve this task. However, (i) the inherent Zipfian distribution of supervised training instances for a given word and/or (ii) the quality of linguistic knowledge representations motivate the development of completely unsupervised and knowledge-free approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD). They are particularly useful for under-resourced languages which do not have any resources for building either supervised …
This paper presents a new model of WordNet that is used to disambiguate the correct sense of polysemy word based on the clue words. The related words for each sense of a polysemy word as well as single sense word are referred to as the clue words. The conventional WordNet organizes nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs together into sets of synonyms called synsets each expressing a different concept. In contrast to the structure of WordNet, we developed a new model of WordNet that organizes the different senses of polysemy words as well as the single sense words based on the clue words. These c…
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);University of the Basque Country(巴斯克大学)
Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) is the task of linking a named-entity mention to an instance in a knowledge-base, typically Wikipedia. This task is closely related to word-sense disambiguation (WSD), where the supervised word-expert approach has prevailed. In this work we present the results of the word-expert approach to NED, where one classifier is built for each target entity mention string. The resources necessary to build the system, a dictionary and a set of training instances, have been automatically derived from Wikipedia. We provide empirical evidence of the value of this approach, …
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), the process of automatically identifying the meaning of a polysemous word in a sentence, is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Progress in this approach to WSD opens up many promising developments in the field of NLP and its applications. Indeed, improvement over current performance levels could allow us to take a first step towards natural language understanding. Due to the lack of lexical resources it is sometimes difficult to perform WSD for under-resourced languages. This paper is an investigation on how to initiate research in WSD for…
Contextualized word representations are able to give different representations for the same word in different contexts, and they have been shown to be effective in downstream natural language processing tasks, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. However, evaluation on word sense disambiguation (WSD) in prior work shows that using contextualized word representations does not outperform the state-of-the-art approach that makes use of non-contextualized word embeddings. In this paper, we explore different strategies of integrating pre-trained contextualiz…
Modern transformer-based neural architectures yield impressive results in nearly every NLP task and Word Sense Disambiguation, the problem of discerning the correct sense of a word in a given context, is no exception. State-of-the-art approaches in WSD today leverage lexical information along with pre-trained embeddings from these models to achieve results comparable to human inter-annotator agreement on standard evaluation benchmarks. In the same vein, we experiment with several strategies to optimize bi-encoders for this specific task and propose alternative methods of presenting lexical inf…
Determining the intended sense of words in text - word sense disambiguation (WSD) - is a long standing problem in natural language processing. Recently, researchers have shown promising results using word vectors extracted from a neural network language model as features in WSD algorithms. However, a simple average or concatenation of word vectors for each word in a text loses the sequential and syntactic information of the text. In this paper, we study WSD with a sequence learning neural net, LSTM, to better capture the sequential and syntactic patterns of the text. To alleviate the lack of t…
Various applications in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence rely on high-performing word sense disambiguation techniques to solve challenging tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, question answering, and document clustering. While text comprehension is intuitive for humans, machines face tremendous challenges in processing and interpreting a human's natural language. This paper presents a novel knowledge-based word sense disambiguation algorithm, namely Sequential Contextual Similarity Matrix Multiplication (SCSMM). The SCSMM algorithm combines semantic si…
We release to the community six large-scale sense-annotated datasets in multiple language to pave the way for supervised multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation. Our datasets cover all the nouns in the English WordNet and their translations in other languages for a total of millions of sense-tagged sentences. Experiments prove that these corpora can be effectively used as training sets for supervised WSD systems, surpassing the state of the art for low-resourced languages and providing competitive results for English, where manually annotated training sets are accessible. The data is available …
University of Alicante(阿利坎特大学);Basque Country University(巴斯克大学)
In this paper we concentrate on the resolution of the lexical ambiguity that arises when a given word has several different meanings. This specific task is commonly referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). The task of WSD consists of assigning the correct sense to words using an electronic dictionary as the source of word definitions. We present two WSD methods based on two main methodological approaches in this research area: a knowledge-based method and a corpus-based method. Our hypothesis is that word-sense disambiguation requires several knowledge sources in order to solve the sema…
We address the problem of clustering words (or constructing a thesaurus) based on co-occurrence data, and using the acquired word classes to improve the accuracy of syntactic disambiguation. We view this problem as that of estimating a joint probability distribution specifying the joint probabilities of word pairs, such as noun verb pairs. We propose an efficient algorithm based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle for estimating such a probability distribution. Our method is a natural extension of those proposed in (Brown et al 92) and (Li & Abe 96), and overcomes their drawbacks…
(This is not the abstract): The language is Japanese. If your printer does not have fonts for Japases characters, the characters in figures will not be printed out correctly. Dissertation for Bachelor's degree at Kyoto University(Nagao lab.),March 1994.
We develop and test a novel unsupervised algorithm for word sense induction and disambiguation which uses topological data analysis. Typical approaches to the problem involve clustering, based on simple low level features of distance in word embeddings. Our approach relies on advanced mathematical concepts in the field of topology which provides a richer conceptualization of clusters for the word sense induction tasks. We use a persistent homology barcode algorithm on the SemCor dataset and demonstrate that our approach gives low relative error on word sense induction. This shows the promise o…
Word sense disambiguation has developed as a sub-area of natural language processing, as if, like parsing, it was a well-defined task which was a pre-requisite to a wide range of language-understanding applications. First, I review earlier work which shows that a set of senses for a word is only ever defined relative to a particular human purpose, and that a view of word senses as part of the linguistic furniture lacks theoretical underpinnings. Then, I investigate whether and how word sense ambiguity is in fact a problem for different varieties of NLP application.
LIAAD - INESC TEC(LIAAD——INESC TEC(葡萄牙系统与计算机工程研究所技术与科学中心));Faculty of Sciences - University of Porto(波尔图大学理学院)
Contextual embeddings represent a new generation of semantic representations learned from Neural Language Modelling (NLM) that addresses the issue of meaning conflation hampering traditional word embeddings. In this work, we show that contextual embeddings can be used to achieve unprecedented gains in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tasks. Our approach focuses on creating sense-level embeddings with full-coverage of WordNet, and without recourse to explicit knowledge of sense distributions or task-specific modelling. As a result, a simple Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) method using our representatio…
We compare four similarity-based estimation methods against back-off and maximum-likelihood estimation methods on a pseudo-word sense disambiguation task in which we controlled for both unigram and bigram frequency. The similarity-based methods perform up to 40% better on this particular task. We also conclude that events that occur only once in the training set have major impact on similarity-based estimates.
Most probabilistic classifiers used for word-sense disambiguation have either been based on only one contextual feature or have used a model that is simply assumed to characterize the interdependencies among multiple contextual features. In this paper, a different approach to formulating a probabilistic model is presented along with a case study of the performance of models produced in this manner for the disambiguation of the noun "interest". We describe a method for formulating probabilistic models that use multiple contextual features for word-sense disambiguation, without requiring unteste…