Fast max-margin clustering for unsupervised word sense disambiguation in biomedical texts

Abstract

Background: We aim to solve the problem of determining word senses for ambiguous biomedical terms with minimal human effort. Methods: We build a fully automated system for Word Sense Disambiguation by designing a system that does not require manually-constructed external resources or manually-labeled training examples except for a single ambiguous word. The system uses a novel and efficient graph-based algorithm to cluster words into groups that have the same meaning. Our algorithm follows the principle of finding a maximum margin between clusters, determining a split of the data that maximizes the minimum distance between pairs of data points belonging to two different clusters. Results: On a test set of 21 ambiguous keywords from PubMed abstracts, our system has an average accuracy of 78%, outperforming a state-of-the-art unsupervised system by 2% and a baseline technique by 23%. On a standard data set from the National Library of Medicine, our system outperforms the baseline by 6% and comes within 5% of the accuracy of a supervised system. Conclusion: Our system is a novel, state-of-the-art technique for efficiently finding word sense clusters, and does not require training data or human effort for each new word to be disambiguated. © 2009 Duan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.