1,896 research outputs found
Retrieving with good sense
Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information
retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in
disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information
retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt
from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval
Disambiguating Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Using Automatically Acquired Selectional Preferences
Selectional preferences have been used by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems as one source of disambiguating information. We evaluate WSD using selectional preferences acquired for English adjective—noun, subject, and direct object grammatical relationships with respect to a standard test corpus. The selectional preferences are specific to verb or adjective classes, rather than individual word forms, so they can be used to disambiguate the co-occurring adjectives and verbs, rather than just the nominal argument heads. We also investigate use of the one-senseper-discourse heuristic to propagate a sense tag for a word to other occurrences of the same word within the current document in order to increase coverage. Although the preferences perform well in comparison with other unsupervised WSD systems on the same corpus, the results show that for many applications, further knowledge sources would be required to achieve an adequate level of accuracy and coverage. In addition to quantifying performance, we analyze the results to investigate the situations in which the selectional preferences achieve the best precision and in which the one-sense-per-discourse heuristic increases performance
Distinguishing Word Senses in Untagged Text
This paper describes an experimental comparison of three unsupervised
learning algorithms that distinguish the sense of an ambiguous word in untagged
text. The methods described in this paper, McQuitty's similarity analysis,
Ward's minimum-variance method, and the EM algorithm, assign each instance of
an ambiguous word to a known sense definition based solely on the values of
automatically identifiable features in text. These methods and feature sets are
found to be more successful in disambiguating nouns rather than adjectives or
verbs. Overall, the most accurate of these procedures is McQuitty's similarity
analysis in combination with a high dimensional feature set.Comment: 11 pages, latex, uses aclap.st
Word sense disambiguation criteria: a systematic study
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
A Word Sense-Oriented User Interface for Interactive Multilingual Text Retrieval
In this paper we present an interface for supporting a user in an interactive cross-language search process using semantic classes. In order to enable users to access multilingual information, different problems have to be solved: disambiguating and translating the query words, as well as categorizing and presenting the results appropriately. Therefore, we first give a brief introduction to word sense disambiguation, cross-language text retrieval and document categorization and finally describe recent achievements of our research towards an interactive multilingual retrieval system. We focus especially on the problem of browsing and navigation of the different word senses in one source and possibly several target languages. In the last part of the paper, we discuss the developed user interface and its functionalities in more detail
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