4,916 research outputs found
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
Enriching very large ontologies using the WWW
This paper explores the possibility to exploit text on the world wide web in
order to enrich the concepts in existing ontologies. First, a method to
retrieve documents from the WWW related to a concept is described. These
document collections are used 1) to construct topic signatures (lists of
topically related words) for each concept in WordNet, and 2) to build
hierarchical clusters of the concepts (the word senses) that lexicalize a given
word. The overall goal is to overcome two shortcomings of WordNet: the lack of
topical links among concepts, and the proliferation of senses. Topic signatures
are validated on a word sense disambiguation task with good results, which are
improved when the hierarchical clusters are used.Comment: 6 page
Finding predominant word senses in untagged text
In word sense disambiguation (WSD), the heuristic of choosing the most common sense is extremely powerful because the distribution of the senses of a word is often skewed. The problem with using the predominant, or first sense heuristic, aside from the fact that it does not take surrounding context into account, is that it assumes some quantity of handtagged data. Whilst there are a few hand-tagged corpora available for some languages, one would expect the frequency distribution of the senses of words, particularly topical words, to depend on the genre and domain of the text under consideration. We present work on the use of a thesaurus acquired from raw textual corpora and the WordNet similarity package to find predominant noun senses automatically. The acquired predominant senses give a precision of 64% on the nouns of the SENSEVAL- 2 English all-words task. This is a very promising result given that our method does not require any hand-tagged text, such as SemCor. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method discovers appropriate predominant senses for words from two domainspecific corpora
A Machine learning approach to POS tagging
We have applied inductive learning of statistical decision trees
and relaxation labelling to the Natural Language Processing (NLP)
task of morphosyntactic disambiguation (Part Of Speech Tagging).
The learning process is supervised and obtains a language
model oriented to resolve POS ambiguities. This model consists
of a set of statistical decision trees expressing distribution of
tags and words in some relevant contexts.
The acquired language models are complete enough to be directly
used as sets of POS disambiguation rules, and include more complex
contextual information than simple collections of n-grams usually
used in statistical taggers.
We have implemented a quite simple and fast tagger that has been
tested and evaluated on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus with
a remarkable accuracy.
However, better results can be obtained by translating the trees
into rules to feed a flexible relaxation labelling based tagger.
In this direction we describe a tagger which is able to use
information of any kind (n-grams, automatically acquired constraints,
linguistically motivated manually written constraints, etc.), and in
particular to incorporate the machine learned decision trees.
Simultaneously, we address the problem of tagging when only
small training material is available, which is crucial in any process
of constructing, from scratch, an annotated corpus. We show that quite
high accuracy can be achieved with our system in this situation.Postprint (published version
Large-Scale information extraction from textual definitions through deep syntactic and semantic analysis
We present DEFIE, an approach to large-scale Information Extraction (IE) based on a syntactic-semantic analysis of textual definitions. Given a large corpus of definitions we leverage syntactic dependencies to reduce data sparsity, then disambiguate the arguments and content words of the relation strings, and finally exploit the resulting information to organize the acquired relations hierarchically. The output of DEFIE is a high-quality knowledge base consisting of several million automatically acquired semantic relations
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