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

Improving word sense disambiguation in lexical chaining

Previous algorithms to compute lexical chains suffer either from a lack of accuracy in word sense disambiguation (WSD) or from computational inefficiency. In this paper, we present a new linear-time algorithm for lexical chaining that adopts the assumption of one sense per discourse. Our results show an improvement over previous algorithms when evaluated on a WSD task

Improving Japanese Zero Pronoun Resolution by Global Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper proposes unsupervised word sense disambiguation based on automatically constructed case frames and its incorporation into our zero pronoun resolution system. The word sense disambiguation is applied to verbs and nouns. We consider that case frames define verb senses and semantic features in a thesaurus define noun senses, respectively, and perform sense disambiguation by selecting them based on case analysis. In addition, according to the one sense per discourse heuristic, the word sense disambiguation results are cached and applied globally to the subsequent words. We integrated this global word sense disambiguation into our zero pronoun resolution system, and conducted experiments of zero pronoun resolution on two different domain corpora. Both of the experimental results indicated the effectiveness of our approach.

What Makes Sense? : Searching for Strong WSD Predictors in Croatian

The goal of this research was to investigate and determine position of strong predictors for word sense disambiguation of Croatian nouns. Research was conducted using supervised learning methods and a corpus of around 70 million words. We have concluded that words in the immediate vicinity of an observed lexeme (1-5 words left and right) have the highest discriminative power. We have also measured the applicability and accuracy of the one-sense-per-discourse method and found it to be very successful as well as the impact of sentence boundaries which proved not to be a good criterion for selecting strong predictors

One Homonym per Translation

The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses, collocations, and sense clusters. We present a new annotated homonym resource that allows us to test our hypotheses on existing WSD resources. The results of the experiments provide strong empirical evidence for the hypotheses. This study represents a step towards a computational method for distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy, and constructing a definitive inventory of coarse-grained senses.Comment: 8 pages, including reference

Discourse relations and conjoined VPs: automated sense recognition

Sense classification of discourse relations is a sub-task of shallow discourse parsing. Discourse relations can occur both across sentences (inter-sentential) and within sentences (intra-sentential), and more than one discourse relation can hold between the same units. Using a newly available corpus of discourse-annotated intra-sentential conjoined verb phrases, we demonstrate a sequential classification system for their multi-label sense classification. We assess the importance of each feature used in the classification, the feature scope, and what is lost in moving from gold standard manual parses to the output of an off-the-shelf parser

Getting our country back : the UK press on the eve of the EU referendum

This paper investigates a critical discourse analysis the author has conducted of UK mainstream newspaper coverage on the eve of the EU referendum. Immigration became a key issue in the closing days. The paper will explore the possibility that the discourse moved from persuasion to prejudice and xenophobia. The paper will also argue that in the age of populist post-truth politics, some of the newspapers also employed such emotive rhetoric, designed to influence and compel the audience to draw certain conclusions – to get their country back. In so doing, it is argued some of the UK media also pose a serious threat to democracy and journalism – rather than holding those in power to account and maintaining high journalistic standards. The notion that that some of the UK media played on public perceptions and a collective memory that has created, propagated and embedded many myths about the EU for decades, is explored. The possibility this swayed many – despite limited or a lack of substantiation, is explored, a discourse of ellipsis, if you will

Gender Relations and Women’s Off-farm Employment: a critical analysis of discourses

End of Project ReportThis project addresses gender relations on dairy farms in Irish Republic. Its aim was to explore the way women who are married to farmers but who are employed in paid employment off the farm are constructed in agricultural policy discourse. It was proposed that discourses encapsulate the values and interests of powerful actors and are constitutive in their effect. Hence they are implicated in women’s experience of life within a ‘farm family’. Following on from this it may be said that women’ s continued subordination in Irish farming or indeed their chances of achieving equal status are circumscribed by dominant discourses