38 research outputs found
Word Sense Disambiguation with LSTM: Do We Really Need 100 Billion Words?
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 trained
models are made freely available
Knowledge-based approaches to producing large-scale training data from scratch for Word Sense Disambiguation and Sense Distribution Learning
Communicating and understanding each other is one of the most important human abilities.
As humans, in fact, we can easily assign the correct meaning to the ambiguous words in a text, while, at the same time, being able to abstract, summarise and enrich its content with new information that we learned somewhere else.
On the contrary, machines rely on formal languages which do not leave space to ambiguity hence being easy to parse and understand.
Therefore, to fill the gap between humans and machines and enabling the latter to better communicate with and comprehend its sentient counterpart, in the modern era of computer-science's much effort has been put into developing Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches which aim at understanding and handling the ambiguity of the human language.
At the core of NLP lies the task of correctly interpreting the meaning of each word in a given text, hence disambiguating its content exactly as a human would do.
Researchers in the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) field address exactly this issue by leveraging either knowledge bases, i.e. graphs where nodes are concept and edges are semantic relations among them, or manually-annotated datasets for training machine learning algorithms. One common obstacle is the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem, id est, retrieving or generating semantically-annotated data which are necessary to build both semantic graphs or training sets is a complex task.
This phenomenon is even more serious when considering languages other than English where resources to generate human-annotated data are scarce and ready-made datasets are completely absent. With the advent of deep learning this issue became even more serious as more complex models need larger datasets in order to learn meaningful patterns to solve the task.
Another critical issue in WSD, as well as in other machine-learning-related fields, is the domain adaptation problem, id est, performing the same task in different application domains.
This is particularly hard when dealing with word senses, as, in fact, they are governed by a Zipfian distribution; hence, by slightly changing the application domain, a sense might become very frequent even though it is very rare in the general domain.
For example the geometric sense of plane is very frequent in a corpus made of math books, while it is very rare in a general domain dataset.
In this thesis we address both these problems. Inter alia, we focus on relieving the burden of human annotations in Word Sense Disambiguation thus enabling the automatic construction of high-quality sense-annotated dataset not only for English, but especially for other languages where sense-annotated data are not available at all.
Furthermore, recognising in word-sense distribution one of the main pitfalls for WSD approaches, we also alleviate the dependency on most frequent sense information by automatically inducing the word-sense distribution in a given text of raw sentences.
In the following we propose a language-independent and automatic approach to generating semantic annotations given a collection of sentences, and then introduce two methods for the automatic inference of word-sense distributions.
Finally, we combine the two kind of approaches to build a semantically-annotated dataset that reflect the sense distribution which we automatically infer from the target text
New frontiers in supervised word sense disambiguation: building multilingual resources and neural models on a large scale
Word Sense Disambiguation is a long-standing task in Natural Language Processing
(NLP), lying at the core of human language understanding. While it has already
been studied from many different angles over the years, ranging from knowledge
based systems to semi-supervised and fully supervised models, the field seems to
be slowing down in respect to other NLP tasks, e.g., part-of-speech tagging and
dependencies parsing. Despite the organization of several international competitions
aimed at evaluating Word Sense Disambiguation systems, the evaluation of automatic
systems has been problematic mainly due to the lack of a reliable evaluation
framework aiming at performing a direct quantitative confrontation.
To this end we develop a unified evaluation framework and analyze the performance
of various Word Sense Disambiguation systems in a fair setup. The results
show that supervised systems clearly outperform knowledge-based models. Among
the supervised systems, a linear classifier trained on conventional local features
still proves to be a hard baseline to beat. Nonetheless, recent approaches exploiting
neural networks on unlabeled corpora achieve promising results, surpassing this
hard baseline in most test sets. Even though supervised systems tend to perform
best in terms of accuracy, they often lose ground to more flexible knowledge-based
solutions, which do not require training for every disambiguation target. To bridge
this gap we adopt a different perspective and rely on sequence learning to frame
the disambiguation problem: we propose and study in depth a series of end-to-end
neural architectures directly tailored to the task, from bidirectional Long ShortTerm
Memory to encoder-decoder models. Our extensive evaluation over standard
benchmarks and in multiple languages shows that sequence learning enables more
versatile all-words models that consistently lead to state-of-the-art results, even
against models trained with engineered features.
However, supervised systems need annotated training corpora and the few available
to date are of limited size: this is mainly due to the expensive and timeconsuming
process of annotating a wide variety of word senses at a reasonably high
scale, i.e., the so-called knowledge acquisition bottleneck. To address this issue, we
also present different strategies to acquire automatically high quality sense annotated
data in multiple languages, without any manual effort. We assess the quality of the
sense annotations both intrinsically and extrinsically achieving competitive results
on multiple tasks
The Acquisition Of Lexical Knowledge From The Web For Aspects Of Semantic Interpretation
This work investigates the effective acquisition of lexical knowledge from the Web to perform semantic interpretation. The Web provides an unprecedented amount of natural language from which to gain knowledge useful for semantic interpretation. The knowledge acquired is described as common sense knowledge, information one uses in his or her daily life to understand language and perception. Novel approaches are presented for both the acquisition of this knowledge and use of the knowledge in semantic interpretation algorithms. The goal is to increase accuracy over other automatic semantic interpretation systems, and in turn enable stronger real world applications such as machine translation, advanced Web search, sentiment analysis, and question answering. The major contributions of this dissertation consist of two methods of acquiring lexical knowledge from the Web, namely a database of common sense knowledge and Web selectors. The first method is a framework for acquiring a database of concept relationships. To acquire this knowledge, relationships between nouns are found on the Web and analyzed over WordNet using information-theory, producing information about concepts rather than ambiguous words. For the second contribution, words called Web selectors are retrieved which take the place of an instance of a target word in its local context. The selectors serve for the system to learn the types of concepts that the sense of a target word should be similar. Web selectors are acquired dynamically as part of a semantic interpretation algorithm, while the relationships in the database are useful to iii stand-alone programs. A final contribution of this dissertation concerns a novel semantic similarity measure and an evaluation of similarity and relatedness measures on tasks of concept similarity. Such tasks are useful when applying acquired knowledge to semantic interpretation. Applications to word sense disambiguation, an aspect of semantic interpretation, are used to evaluate the contributions. Disambiguation systems which utilize semantically annotated training data are considered supervised. The algorithms of this dissertation are considered minimallysupervised; they do not require training data created by humans, though they may use humancreated data sources. In the case of evaluating a database of common sense knowledge, integrating the knowledge into an existing minimally-supervised disambiguation system significantly improved results â a 20.5% error reduction. Similarly, the Web selectors disambiguation system, which acquires knowledge directly as part of the algorithm, achieved results comparable with top minimally-supervised systems, an F-score of 80.2% on a standard noun disambiguation task. This work enables the study of many subsequent related tasks for improving semantic interpretation and its application to real-world technologies. Other aspects of semantic interpretation, such as semantic role labeling could utilize the same methods presented here for word sense disambiguation. As the Web continues to grow, the capabilities of the systems in this dissertation are expected to increase. Although the Web selectors system achieves great results, a study in this dissertation shows likely improvements from acquiring more data. Furthermore, the methods for acquiring a database of common sense knowledge could be applied in a more exhaustive fashion for other types of common sense knowledge. Finally, perhaps the greatest benefits from this work will come from the enabling of real world technologies that utilize semantic interpretation
Co-occurrence graphs for word sense disambiguation in the biomedical domain
Word Sense Disambiguation is a key step for many Natural Language Processing tasks (e.g. summarization,
text classification, relation extraction) and presents a challenge to any system that
aims to process documents from the biomedical domain. In this paper, we present a new graphbased
unsupervised technique to address this problem. The knowledge base used in this work is
a graph built with co-occurrence information from medical concepts found in scientific abstracts,
and hence adapted to the specific domain. Unlike other unsupervised approaches based on static
graphs such as UMLS, in this work the knowledge base takes the context of the ambiguous terms
into account. Abstracts downloaded from PubMed are used for building the graph and disambiguation
is performed using the Personalized PageRank algorithm. Evaluation is carried out over
two test datasets widely explored in the literature. Different parameters of the system are also
evaluated to test robustness and scalability. Results show that the system is able to outperform
state-of-the-art knowledge-based systems, obtaining more than 10% of accuracy improvement in
some cases, while only requiring minimal external resources