One Classifier for All Ambiguous Words: Overcoming Data Sparsity by Utilizing Sense Correlations Across Words

Abstract

Most supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems build word-specific classifiers by leveraging labeled data. However, when using word-specific classifiers, the sparseness of annotations leads to inferior sense disambiguation performance on less frequently seen words. To combat data sparsity, we propose to learn a single model that derives sense representations and meanwhile enforces congruence between a word instance and its right sense by using both sense-annotated data and lexical resources. The model is shared across words that allows utilizing sense correlations across words, and therefore helps to transfer common disambiguation rules from annotation-rich words to annotation-lean words. Empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed shared model outperforms the equivalent classifier-based models by 1.7\%, 2.5\% and 3.8\% in F1-score when using GloVe, ELMo and BERT word embeddings respectively.

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