SMART: Today's talk by Roberto Navigli [Methods for clustering word senses]

[Giorgio Zanin]

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.

 

http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/smart/

 

Please feel free to extend this invitation to other interested people.