Disambiguating Polysemous Word Senses Based on Semantic Types and Syntactic Collocations: A Case Study of “Zhongguo+N”

Abstract

This paper deals with the polysemous words in noun compounds and investigates the relationship between their senses and the semantic types of the co-occurrent nouns. Taking “Zhongguo+N” as a studying case, we first review the senses of Zhongguo that are defined in Chinese Wordnet, WordNet and HowNet. Then we claim an innovative way of distinguishing the senses by integrating the semantic types based method and collocation based method. Afterwards, we focus on the noun compounds of “Zhongguo+N” and investigate the relationships between the semantic types of the collocating nouns and the different senses of Zhongguo. It turns out that the senses of the polysemous words are related to the semantic types of the co-occurrent nouns. In detail, the sense of culture highly relates to artificial objects, and the sense of location has more collocating nouns, while the sense of organization has the lowest frequency. These results show that the collocation information is the solid evidence for the sense distribution.