In parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings are highly correlated with morphological knowledge, which can help to disambiguate word senses. However, in-depth exploration of morphological knowledge in previous word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods is still lacking due to the absence of publicly available resources. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance Chinese WSD with full morphological knowledge, including both word-formations and morphemes. We first construct the largest and releasable Chinese WSD resources, including the lexico-semantic inventories MorInv and WrdInv, a Chinese WSD dataset MiCLS, and an out-of-volcabulary (OOV) test set. Then, we propose a model, MorBERT, to fully leverage this morphology-informed knowledge for Chinese WSD and achieve a SOTA F1 of 92.18% in the task. Finally, we demonstrated the model’s robustness in low-resource settings and generalizability to OOV senses. These resources and methods may bring new insights into and solutions for various downstream tasks in both computational and humanistic fields.

Morphemes serve as a strong linguistic feature to capture lexical semantics, with higher coverage than words and more natural than sememes. However, due to the lack of morpheme-informed resources and the expense of manual annotation, morpheme-enhanced methods remain largely unexplored in Computational Linguistics. To address this issue, we propose the task of Morpheme Sense Disambiguation (MSD), with two subtasks in-text and in-word, similar to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Sememe Prediction (SP), to generalize morpheme features on more tasks. We first build the MorDis resource for Chinese, including MorInv as a morpheme inventory, MorTxt and MorWrd as two types of morpheme-annotated datasets. Next, we provide two baselines in each evaluation; the best model yields a promising precision of 77.66% on in-text MSD and 88.19% on in-word MSD, indicating its comparability with WSD and superiority over SP. Finally, we demonstrate that predicted morphemes achieve comparable performance with the ground-truth ones on a downstream application of Definition Generation (DG). This validates the feasibility and applicability of our proposed tasks. The resources and workflow of MSD will provide new insights and solutions for downstream tasks, including DG as well as WSD, training pre-trained models, etc.

“汉语是一种意合型语言,汉语中语素的构词方式与规律是描述、理解词义的重要因素。关于语素构词的方式,语言学界有语法构词与语义构词这两种观点,其中,语义构词对语素间关系的表达更为深入。本文采取语义构词的路线,基于语言学视角,考虑汉语构词特点,提出了一套面向计算的语义构词结构体系,通过随机森林自动标注与人工校验相结合的方式,构建汉语语义构词知识库,并在词义生成的任务上对该资源进行计算评估。实验取得了良好的结果,基于语义构词知识库的词义生成BLEU值达25.07,较此前的语法构词提升了3.17%,初步验证了这种知识表示方法的有效性。该知识表示方法与资源建设将为人文领域和信息处理等多方面的应用提供新的思路与方案。”