Chinese word sense disambiguation using HowNet

Abstract

Word sense disambiguation plays an important role in natural language processing, such as information retrieval, text summarization, machine translation etc. This paper proposes a corpus-based Chinese word sense disambiguation approach using HowNet. The method is based on the co-occurrence frequency between the relatives (such as synonym, antonymy, meronymy) of target word and each word in the context. Further, domains have been used to characterize the senses of polysemous word. To our knowledge, this is the first time a Chinese word sense disambiguation method using domain knowledge is reported. The accuracy is 73.2% at present. The experimental result shows that the method is very promising for Chinese word sense disambiguation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.