Today's SMART: Roberto Navigli [A structural approach to the automatic adjudication of disagreed word senses]

[Giorgio Zanin]

Title           : A structural approach to the automatic adjudication of disagreed word senses

Speaker         : Roberto Navigli

Date            : Monday, May 15, 2006

Venue & Time    : Aula Alfa, 113 Via Salaria. 3:00 PM

Abstract        : The annotation of texts with senses from a

                  dictionary is a complex and often subjective task,

                  especially if the reference dictionary encodes

                  subtle sense distinctions (e.g. race as a

                  competition and as a contest of speed).  If a text

                  is semantically tagged by more than one annotator,

                  an issue arises: how do we adjudicate the disagreed

                  words? A judge is expected to choose among the

                  distinct senses provided by different annotators for

                  the same word. Unfortunately, it is difficult to

                  understand why a judge should prefer a choice over

                  the others.  In this talk, we propose the use of

                  lexical chains (i.e. sequences of related words,

                  like race -> compete -> competition) to

                  automatically support judges in the difficult task

                  of validating sense annotations.  The interesting

                  aspect of the approach lies in the fact that each

                  choice, i.e. each solution of a disagreement, is

                  justified in terms of graphs that support that

                  choice.  We provide a two-fold experimental

                  evaluation of our approach applied to the validation

                  of manual and automatic sense annotations from

                  standard test sets.  Finally, we present an online

                  implementation of the approach, Valido

                  (http://lcl.di.uniroma1.it/valido), and discuss some

                  real-world cases of disagreement.

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

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