Fusion techniques for named entity recognition and word sense induction and disambiguation

Abstract

In this paper we explore the use of well-known multimodal fusion techniques to solve two prominent Natural Language Processing tasks. Specifically, we focus on solving Named Entity Recognition and Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation by applying feature-combination methods that have already shown their efficiency in the multimedia analysis domain. We present a series of experiments employing fusion techniques in order to combine textual linguistic features. Our intuition is that by combining different types of features we may find semantic relatedness among words at different levels and thus, the combination (and recombination) of these levels may yield gains in terms of metrics’ performance. To our knowledge, employing these techniques has not been studied for the tasks we address in this paper. We test the proposed fusion techniques on three datasets for named entity recognition and one for word sense disambiguation and induction. Our results show that the combination of textual features indeed improves the performance compared to single feature representation and the trivial feature concatenation.