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 of topological algorithms for natural language processing and we advocate for future work in this promising area.
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…
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.
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 (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.
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
College of Engineering and Management, Kolaghat(科拉加特工程与管理学院);Jadavpur University(贾达普大学)
In this paper, we are going to focus on speed up of the Word Sense Disambiguation procedure by filtering the relevant senses of an ambiguous word through Part-of-Speech Tagging. First, this proposed approach performs the Part-of-Speech Tagging operation before the disambiguation procedure using Bigram approximation. As a result, the exact Part-of-Speech of the ambiguous word at a particular text instance is derived. In the next stage, only those dictionary definitions (glosses) are retrieved from an online dictionary, which are associated with that particular Part-of-Speech to disambiguate the…
The task of Semantic Parsing can be approximated as a transformation of an utterance into a logical form graph where edges represent semantic roles and nodes represent word senses. The resulting representation should be capture the meaning of the utterance and be suitable for reasoning. Word senses and semantic roles are interdependent, meaning errors in assigning word senses can cause errors in assigning semantic roles and vice versa. While statistical approaches to word sense disambiguation outperform logical, rule-based semantic parsers for raw word sense assignment, these statistical word …
Cross-lingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) tackles the challenge of disambiguating ambiguous words across languages given context. The pre-trained BERT embedding model has been proven to be effective in extracting contextual information of words, and have been incorporated as features into many state-of-the-art WSD systems. In order to investigate how syntactic information can be added into the BERT embeddings to result in both semantics- and syntax-incorporated word embeddings, this project proposes the concatenated embeddings by producing dependency parse tress and encoding the relative r…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington(华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院);Facebook AI Research(脸书人工智能研究院)
A major obstacle in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is that word senses are not uniformly distributed, causing existing models to generally perform poorly on senses that are either rare or unseen during training. We propose a bi-encoder model that independently embeds (1) the target word with its surrounding context and (2) the dictionary definition, or gloss, of each sense. The encoders are jointly optimized in the same representation space, so that sense disambiguation can be performed by finding the nearest sense embedding for each target word embedding. Our system outperforms previous stat…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to find the exact sense of an ambiguous word in a particular context. Traditional supervised methods rarely take into consideration the lexical resources like WordNet, which are widely utilized in knowledge-based methods. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of incorporating gloss (sense definition) into neural networks for WSD. However, compared with traditional word expert supervised methods, they have not achieved much improvement. In this paper, we focus on how to better leverage gloss knowledge in a supervised neural WSD system. We construct con…
Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences(波兰科学院计算机科学研究所);National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester(曼彻斯特大学国家文本挖掘中心)
In this paper, the problem of disambiguating a target word for Polish is approached by searching for related words with known meaning. These relatives are used to build a training corpus from unannotated text. This technique is improved by proposing new rich sources of replacements that substitute the traditional requirement of monosemy with heuristics based on wordnet relations. The naïve Bayesian classifier has been modified to account for an unknown distribution of senses. A corpus of 600 million web documents (594 billion tokens), gathered by the NEKST search engine allows us to assess the…
In this paper, we made a survey on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Near about in all major languages around the world, research in WSD has been conducted upto different extents. In this paper, we have gone through a survey regarding the different approaches adopted in different research works, the State of the Art in the performance in this domain, recent works in different Indian languages and finally a survey in Bengali language. We have made a survey on different competitions in this field and the bench mark results, obtained from those competitions.
LIAAD - INESC TEC;University of Porto(波尔图大学);School of Computer Science and Informatics(计算机科学与信息学院);Cardiff University(卡迪夫大学)
State-of-the-art methods for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) combine two different features: the power of pre-trained language models and a propagation method to extend the coverage of such models. This propagation is needed as current sense-annotated corpora lack coverage of many instances in the underlying sense inventory (usually WordNet). At the same time, unambiguous words make for a large portion of all words in WordNet, while being poorly covered in existing sense-annotated corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple method to provide annotations for most unambiguous words in a large co…
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a problem in the field of computational linguistics given as finding the intended sense of a word (or a set of words) when it is activated within a certain context. WSD was recently addressed as a combinatorial optimization problem in which the goal is to find a sequence of senses that maximize the semantic relatedness among the target words. In this article, a novel algorithm for solving the WSD problem called D-Bees is proposed which is inspired by bee colony optimization (BCO)where artificial bee agents collaborate to solve the problem. The D-Bees algorith…
(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.
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 article, we tackle the issue of the limited quantity of manually sense annotated corpora for the task of word sense disambiguation, by exploiting the semantic relationships between senses such as synonymy, hypernymy and hyponymy, in order to compress the sense vocabulary of Princeton WordNet, and thus reduce the number of different sense tags that must be observed to disambiguate all words of the lexical database. We propose two different methods that greatly reduces the size of neural WSD models, with the benefit of improving their coverage without additional training data, and withou…
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.
In natural language processing, word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open problem concerned with identifying the correct sense of words in a particular context. To address this problem, we introduce a novel knowledge-based WSD system. We suggest the adoption of two methods in our system. First, we suggest a novel method to encode the word vector representation by considering the graphical semantic relationships from the lexical knowledge-base. Second, we propose a method for extracting the contextual words from the text for analyzing an ambiguous word based on the similarity of word vector re…
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.
As a key natural language processing (NLP) task, word sense disambiguation (WSD) evaluates how well NLP models can understand the lexical semantics of words under specific contexts. Benefited from the large-scale annotation, current WSD systems have achieved impressive performances in English by combining supervised learning with lexical knowledge. However, such success is hard to be replicated in other languages, where we only have limited annotations.In this paper, based on the multilingual lexicon BabelNet describing the same set of concepts across languages, we propose building knowledge a…
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…
In this paper, we report recent improvements to the exemplar-based learning approach for word sense disambiguation that have achieved higher disambiguation accuracy. By using a larger value of $k$, the number of nearest neighbors to use for determining the class of a test example, and through 10-fold cross validation to automatically determine the best $k$, we have obtained improved disambiguation accuracy on a large sense-tagged corpus first used in \cite{ng96}. The accuracy achieved by our improved exemplar-based classifier is comparable to the accuracy on the same data set obtained by the N…
Statistical models of word-sense disambiguation are often based on a small number of contextual features or on a model that is assumed to characterize the interactions among a set of features. Model selection is presented as an alternative to these approaches, where a sequential search of possible models is conducted in order to find the model that best characterizes the interactions among features. This paper expands existing model selection methodology and presents the first comparative study of model selection search strategies and evaluation criteria when applied to the problem of building…
Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Ural Federal University, Russia(乌拉尔联邦大学自然科学与数学系);Language Technology Group, Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Germany(汉堡大学信息学系语言技术组);Web and Data Science Group, Department of Informatics, Universität Mannheim, Germany(曼海姆大学信息学系网络与数据科学组)
Interpretability of a predictive model is a powerful feature that gains the trust of users in the correctness of the predictions. In word sense disambiguation (WSD), knowledge-based systems tend to be much more interpretable than knowledge-free counterparts as they rely on the wealth of manually-encoded elements representing word senses, such as hypernyms, usage examples, and images. We present a WSD system that bridges the gap between these two so far disconnected groups of methods. Namely, our system, providing access to several state-of-the-art WSD models, aims to be interpretable as a know…
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…
This paper proposes an efficient example sampling method for example-based word sense disambiguation systems. To construct a database of practical size, a considerable overhead for manual sense disambiguation (overhead for supervision) is required. In addition, the time complexity of searching a large-sized database poses a considerable problem (overhead for search). To counter these problems, our method selectively samples a smaller-sized effective subset from a given example set for use in word sense disambiguation. Our method is characterized by the reliance on the notion of training utilit…
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…
The most effective paradigm for word sense disambiguation, supervised learning, seems to be stuck because of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In this paper we take an in-depth study of the performance of decision lists on two publicly available corpora and an additional corpus automatically acquired from the Web, using the fine-grained highly polysemous senses in WordNet. Decision lists are shown a versatile state-of-the-art technique. The experiments reveal, among other facts, that SemCor can be an acceptable (0.7 precision for polysemous words) starting point for an all-words system. Th…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation(语言、认知与计算研究所);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院)
We introduce a new task, visual sense disambiguation for verbs: given an image and a verb, assign the correct sense of the verb, i.e., the one that describes the action depicted in the image. Just as textual word sense disambiguation is useful for a wide range of NLP tasks, visual sense disambiguation can be useful for multimodal tasks such as image retrieval, image description, and text illustration. We introduce VerSe, a new dataset that augments existing multimodal datasets (COCO and TUHOI) with sense labels. We propose an unsupervised algorithm based on Lesk which performs visual sense dis…
University of Mannheim(曼海姆大学);Ural Federal University(乌拉尔联邦大学)
In this paper, we present Watasense, an unsupervised system for word sense disambiguation. Given a sentence, the system chooses the most relevant sense of each input word with respect to the semantic similarity between the given sentence and the synset constituting the sense of the target word. Watasense has two modes of operation. The sparse mode uses the traditional vector space model to estimate the most similar word sense corresponding to its context. The dense mode, instead, uses synset embeddings to cope with the sparsity problem. We describe the architecture of the present system and al…
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).
In Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), the predominant approach generally involves a supervised system trained on sense annotated corpora. The limited quantity of such corpora however restricts the coverage and the performance of these systems. In this article, we propose a new method that solves these issues by taking advantage of the knowledge present in WordNet, and especially the hypernymy and hyponymy relationships between synsets, in order to reduce the number of different sense tags that are necessary to disambiguate all words of the lexical database. Our method leads to state of the art r…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to identify the correct meaning of polysemous words in the particular context. Lexical resources like WordNet which are proved to be of great help for WSD in the knowledge-based methods. However, previous neural networks for WSD always rely on massive labeled data (context), ignoring lexical resources like glosses (sense definitions). In this paper, we integrate the context and glosses of the target word into a unified framework in order to make full use of both labeled data and lexical knowledge. Therefore, we propose GAS: a gloss-augmented WSD neural netw…
We describe a method for automatic word sense disambiguation using a text corpus and a machine-readable dictionary (MRD). The method is based on word similarity and context similarity measures. Words are considered similar if they appear in similar contexts; contexts are similar if they contain similar words. The circularity of this definition is resolved by an iterative, converging process, in which the system learns from the corpus a set of typical usages for each of the senses of the polysemous word listed in the MRD. A new instance of a polysemous word is assigned the sense associated with…
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…
There have been some works that learn a lexicon together with the corpus to improve the word embeddings. However, they either model the lexicon separately but update the neural networks for both the corpus and the lexicon by the same likelihood, or minimize the distance between all of the synonym pairs in the lexicon. Such methods do not consider the relatedness and difference of the corpus and the lexicon, and may not be the best optimized. In this paper, we propose a novel method that considers the relatedness and difference of the corpus and the lexicon. It trains word embeddings by learnin…
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a long-standing problem in natural language processing. One significant challenge in supervised all-words WSD is to classify among senses for a majority of words that lie in the long-tail distribution. For instance, 84% of the annotated words have less than 10 examples in the SemCor training data. This issue is more pronounced as the imbalance occurs in both word and sense distributions. In this work, we propose MetricWSD, a non-parametric few-shot learning approach to mitigate this data imbalance issue. By learning to compute distances among the senses of a …