A Comparative Evaluation of Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithms for German
Verena Henrich, Erhard Hinrichs · 2012
The present paper explores a wide range of word sense disambiguation (WSD) algorithms for German.These WSD algorithms are based on a suite of semantic relatedness measures, including path-based, information-content-based, and gloss-based methods.Since the individual algorithms produce diverse results in terms of precision and thus complement each other well in terms of coverage, a set of combined algorithms is investigated and compared in performance to the individual algorithms.Among the single algorithms considered, a word overlap method derived from the Lesk algorithm that uses Wiktionary glosses and GermaNet lexical fields yields the best F-score of 56.36.This result is outperformed by a combined WSD algorithm that uses weighted majority voting and obtains an F-score of 63.59.The WSD experiments utilize the German wordnet GermaNet as a sense inventory as well as WebCAGe (short for: Web-Harvested Corpus Annotated with GermaNet Senses), a newly constructed, sense-annotated corpus for this language.The WSD experiments also confirm that WSD performance is lower for words with fine-grained sense distinctions compared to words with coarse-grained senses.