Title : Methods for clustering word senses
Speaker : Roberto Navigli
Date : May 22, 2006
Venue & Time : Aula Alfa, 113 Via Salaria. 3:00 PM
Abstract : The success of Word Sense Disambiguation, i.e.
the assignment of the intended meaning to words
in context, heavily depends on the organization
of sense distinctions. WordNet is the only freely
available, large-scale reference dictionary of
English. Unfortunately, WordNet encodes sense
distinctions which are very subtle even for humans
(e.g. payment as a sum of money and as the act of
paying). In this talk, we first survey the existing
approaches to sense clustering, ranging from the
use of contingency matrices to the adoption of
heuristic and structural approaches. Then, we
propose a novel, well-founded approach to the
reduction of granularity of the WordNet sense
inventory. The method groups senses of the same word
based on an automatic mapping to a dictionary which
encodes sense hierarchies. We assess the quality of
the mapping and the induced clustering, and evaluate
the performance of coarse Word Sense Disambiguation
systems in a standard evaluation exercise.
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