Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Sense Definition Embeddings

Sawan Kumar, Sharmistha Jat, Karan Saxena, Partha Talukdar


Abstract
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a long-standing but open problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). WSD corpora are typically small in size, owing to an expensive annotation process. Current supervised WSD methods treat senses as discrete labels and also resort to predicting the Most-Frequent-Sense (MFS) for words unseen during training. This leads to poor performance on rare and unseen senses. To overcome this challenge, we propose Extended WSD Incorporating Sense Embeddings (EWISE), a supervised model to perform WSD by predicting over a continuous sense embedding space as opposed to a discrete label space. This allows EWISE to generalize over both seen and unseen senses, thus achieving generalized zero-shot learning. To obtain target sense embeddings, EWISE utilizes sense definitions. EWISE learns a novel sentence encoder for sense definitions by using WordNet relations and also ConvE, a recently proposed knowledge graph embedding method. We also compare EWISE against other sentence encoders pretrained on large corpora to generate definition embeddings. EWISE achieves new state-of-the-art WSD performance.
Anthology ID:
P19-1568
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5670–5681
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1568
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1568
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sawan Kumar, Sharmistha Jat, Karan Saxena, and Partha Talukdar. 2019. Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Sense Definition Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5670–5681, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Sense Definition Embeddings (Kumar et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/P19-1568.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/P19-1568.mp4
Code
 malllabiisc/EWISE
Data
Word Sense Disambiguation: a Unified Evaluation Framework and Empirical Comparison