Aligning features with sense distinction dimensions

Abstract

In this paper we present word sense disambiguation (WSD) experiments on ten highly polysemous verbs in Chinese, where significant performance improvements are achieved using rich linguistic features. Our system performs significantly better, and in some cases substantially better, than the baseline on all ten verbs. Our results also demonstrate that features extracted from the output of an automatic Chinese semantic role labeling system in general benefited the WSD system, even though the amount of improvement was not consistent across the verbs. For a few verbs, semantic role information actually hurt WSD performance. The inconsistency of feature performance is a general characteristic of the WSD task, as has been observed by others. We argue that this result can be explained by the fact that word senses are partitioned along different dimensions for different verbs and the features therefore need to be tailored to particular verbs in order to achieve adequate accuracy on verb sense disambiguation.