Bridging the Gap Between BabelNet and HowNet: Unsupervised Sense Alignment and Sememe Prediction

Xiang Zhang, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak


Abstract
As the minimum semantic units of natural languages, sememes can provide precise representations of concepts. Despite the widespread utilization of lexical resources for semantic tasks, use of sememes is limited by a lack of available sememe knowledge bases. Recent efforts have been made to connect BabelNet with HowNet by automating sememe prediction. However, these methods depend on large manually annotated datasets. We propose to use sense alignment via a novel unsupervised and explainable method. Our method consists of four stages, each relaxing predefined constraints until a complete alignment of BabelNet synsets to HowNet senses is achieved. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our unsupervised method over previous supervised ones by an improvement of 12% overall F1 score, setting a new state of the art. Our work is grounded in an interpretable propagation of sememe information between lexical resources, and may benefit downstream applications which can incorporate sememe information.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.205
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2789–2798
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.205
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.205
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Zhang, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. Bridging the Gap Between BabelNet and HowNet: Unsupervised Sense Alignment and Sememe Prediction. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2789–2798, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging the Gap Between BabelNet and HowNet: Unsupervised Sense Alignment and Sememe Prediction (Zhang et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.eacl-main.205.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.eacl-main.205.mp4