Word Sense Annotation of Polysemous Words by Multiple Annotators

Rebecca J. Passonneau, Ansaf Salleb-Aoussi, Vikas Bhardwaj, Nancy Ide

Abstract
We describe results of a word sense annotation task using WordNet, involving half a dozen well-trained annotators on ten polysemous words for three parts of speech. One hundred sentences for each word were annotated. Annotators had the same level of training and experience, but interannotator agreement (IA) varied across words. There was some effect of part of speech, with higher agreement on nouns and adjectives, but within the words for each part of speech there was wide variation. This variation in IA does not correlate with number of senses in the inventory, or the number of senses actually selected by annotators. In fact, IA was sometimes quite high for words with many senses. We claim that the IA variation is due to the word meanings, contexts of use, and individual differences among annotators. We find some correlation of IA with sense confusability as measured by a sense confusion threshhold (CT). Data mining for association rules on a flattened data representation indicating each annotator's sense choices identifies outliers for some words, and systematic differences among pairs of annotators on others.
Anthology ID:
L10-1628
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/922_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Rebecca J. Passonneau, Ansaf Salleb-Aoussi, Vikas Bhardwaj, and Nancy Ide. 2010. Word Sense Annotation of Polysemous Words by Multiple Annotators. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Word Sense Annotation of Polysemous Words by Multiple Annotators (Passonneau et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/922_Paper.pdf
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