WSD using Dictionary, Treasurers, supervised
In human language, often a word is used in more than one way. Understanding the
various usage patterns in the language is important for various Natural
Language Processing Applications.
In various usage situations, the same word can mean differently. As, a vast
majority of the information online, is in English, for the sake of simplicity, let
us deal with examples in the English language only.
Let us take the example of the word “bark“:
One meaning of the word refers to the outer covering of the tree. The other
meaning refers to the sound made by a dog. So, here the same word has
different meanings.
Let us take a piece of text:
“Cinnamon comes from the bark of the Cinnamon tree.”
“The dog barked at the stranger.”
Let us now try a sentence with both words:
“The dog was scratching the bark of the tree, when the man approached
the dog to make it stop, the dog barked.”
Suppose, this sentence is passed to an algorithm for sentiment analysis,
“bark” and “barked” might mean the same meaning.
So, we can understand that, same words can mean differently based on
the usage of the word in a particular sentence. The usage of words defines
a lot about their meaning. But the problem lies that, in NLP, while dealing
with text data, we need some way to interpret the different words with
different meanings.
What is Word Sense Disambiguation?
Word Sense Disambiguation is an important method of NLP by which the
meaning of a word is determined, which is used in a particular context. NLP
systems often face the challenge of properly identifying words, and
determining the specific usage of a word in a particular sentence has many
applications.
Word Sense Disambiguation basically solves the ambiguity that arises in
determining the meaning of the same word used in different situations.
Word Sense Disambiguation Applications
WSD has many applications in various text processing and NLP fields.
WSD can be used alongside Lexicography. Much of the
modern Lexicography is corpus-based. WSD, used in Lexicography can
provide significant textual indicators.
WSD can also be used in Text Mining and Information Extraction tasks. As
the major purpose of WSD is to accurately understand the meaning of a
word in particular usage or sentence, it can be used for the correct labeling
of words.
For example, from a security point of view, a text system should be able to
understand the difference between a coal “mine” and a land “mine”.
While the former serves industrial purposes, the latter is a security threat.
So a text mining application must be able to determine the difference
between the two.
Similarly, WSD can be used for Information Retrieval purposes. Information
Retrieval systems work through text data primarily based on textual
information. Knowing the relevance of using a word in any sentence will
surely help.
Challenges in Word Sense Disambiguation
WSD faces a lot of challenges and problems.
The most common problem is the difference between various dictionaries
or text corpus. Different dictionaries have different meanings for words,
which makes the sense of the words to be perceived as different. A lot of
text information is out there and often it is not possible to process
everything properly.
Different applications need different algorithms and that is often a challenge
for WSD.
A problem also arises is that words cannot be divided into discrete
meanings. Words often have related meanings and this causes a lot of
problems.
How to implement WSD?
There are four main ways to implement WSD.
These are:
Dictionary- and knowledge-based methods:
These methods rely on text data like dictionaries, thesaurus, etc. It is based
on the fact that words that are related to each other can be found in the
definitions. The popularly used Lesk method, which we shall discuss more
later is a seminal dictionary-based method.
Supervised methods:
In this type, sense-annotated corpora are used to train machine learning
models. But, a problem that may arise is that such corpora are very tough
and time-consuming to create.
Semi-supervised Methods:
Due to the lack of such corpus, most word sense disambiguation
algorithms use semi-supervised methods. The process starts with a small
amount of data, which is often manually created.
This is used to train an initial classifier. This classifier is used on an
untagged part of the corpus, to create a larger training set. Basically, this
method involves bootstrapping from the initial data, which is referred to as
the seed data.
Semi-supervised methods thus, use both labeled and unlabelled data.
Unsupervised Methods:
Unsupervised Methods pose the greatest challenge to researchers and
NLP professionals. A key assumption of these models is that similar
meanings and senses occur in a similar context. They are not dependent
on manual efforts, hence can overcome the knowledge acquisition
deadlock.
Lesk Algorithm
Lesk Algorithm is a classical Word Sense Disambiguation algorithm
introduced by Michael E. Lesk in 1986.
The Lesk algorithm is based on the idea that words in a given region of the
text will have a similar meaning. In the Simplified Lesk Algorithm, the
correct meaning of each word context is found by getting the sense which
overlaps the most among the given context and its dictionary meaning.
