Soft Word Sense Disambiguation
Ganesh Ramakrishnan, B. P. Prithviraj, A L Deepa, Pushpak Bhattacharyya · DSpace (IIT Bombay) · 2004
Word sense disambiguation is a core problem in many tasks related to language processing. In this paper, we introduce the notion of soft word sense disambiguation which states that given a word, the sense disambiguation system should not commit to a particular sense, but rather, to a set of senses which are not necessarily orthogonal or mutually exclusive. The senses of a word are expressed by its WordNet synsets, arranged according to their relevance. The relevance of these senses are probabilistically determined through a Bayesian Belief Network. The main contribution of the work is a completely probabilistic framework for word-sense disambiguation with a semi-supervised learning technique utilising WordNet. WordNet can be customized to a domain using corpora from that domain. This idea applied to question answering has been evaluated on TREC data and the results are promising.