Improving unsupervised WSD with a dynamic thesaurus

Abstract

The method proposed by Diana McCarthy et al. [1] obtains the predominant sense for an ambiguous word based on a weighted list of terms related to the ambiguous word. This list of terms is obtained using the distributional similarity method proposed by Lin [2] to obtain a thesaurus. In that method, every occurrence of the ambiguous word uses the same thesaurus, regardless of the context where it occurs. Every different word to be disambiguated uses the same thesaurus. In this paper we explore a different method that accounts for the context of a word when determining the most frequent sense of an ambiguous word. In our method the list of distributed similar words is built based on the syntactic context of the ambiguous word. We attain a precision of 69.86%, which is 7% higher than the supervised baseline of using the MFS of 90% SemCor against the remaining 10% of SemCor. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.