Word sense disambiguation for all words without hard labor

Abstract

While the most accurate word sense disambiguation systems are built using supervised learning from sense-tagged data, scaling them up to all words of a language has proved elusive, since preparing a sense-tagged corpus for all words of a language is time-consuming and human labor intensive. In this paper, we propose and implement a completely automatic approach to scale up word sense disambiguation to all words of English. Our approach relies on English-Chinese parallel corpora, English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries, and automatic methods of finding synonyms of Chinese words. No additional human sense annotations or word translations are needed. We conducted a large-scale empirical evaluation on more than 29,000 noun tokens in English texts annotated in OntoNotes 2.0, based on its coarse-grained sense inventory. The evaluation results show that our approach is able to achieve high accuracy, outperforming the first-sense baseline and coming close to a prior reported approach that requires manual human efforts to provide Chinese translations of English senses.