Word sense disambiguation based on constrained random walks in linked semantic networks

Abstract

Word Sense Disambiguation remains a challenging NLP task. Due to the lack of annotated training data, especially for rare senses, the supervised approaches are usually designed for specific subdomains limited to a narrow subset of identified senses. Recent advances in this area have shown that knowledge-based approaches are more scalable and obtain more promising results in all-words WSD scenarios. In this work we present a faster WSD algorithm based on the Monte Carlo approximation of sense probabilities given a context using constrained random walks over linked semantic networks. We show that the local semantic relatedness is mostly sufficient to successfully identify correct senses when an extensive knowledge base and a proper weighting scheme are used. The proposed methods are evaluated on English (SenseEval, SemEval) and Polish (Składnica, KPWr) datasets.