Using the intension of classes and properties definition in ontologies for word sense disambiguation

Abstract

We present an ontology-driven word sense disambiguation process. The main idea consists of using the context of the ambiguous word to decide which class can be assigned to it. The disambiguation relies on similarities between classes assigned to the ambiguous word, classes assigned to terms close to it in the text, and on the type of properties that could occur between them. The computation of the similarity uses domain ontologies to provide semantic distances based on definitions in intension. We tested our approach in the extraction of annotations from biomedical texts. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.