To Word Senses and Beyond: Inducing Concepts with Contextualized Language Models

Bastien Liétard, Pascal Denis, Mikaela Keller


Abstract
Polysemy and synonymy are two crucial interrelated facets of lexical ambiguity. While both phenomena are widely documented in lexical resources and have been studied extensively in NLP, leading to dedicated systems, they are often being considered independently in practical problems. While many tasks dealing with polysemy (e.g. Word Sense Disambiguiation or Induction) highlight the role of word’s senses, the study of synonymy is rooted in the study of concepts, i.e. meanings shared across the lexicon. In this paper, we introduce Concept Induction, the unsupervised task of learning a soft clustering among words that defines a set of concepts directly from data. This task generalizes Word Sense Induction. We propose a bi-level approach to Concept Induction that leverages both a local lemma-centric view and a global cross-lexicon view to induce concepts. We evaluate the obtained clustering on SemCor’s annotated data and obtain good performance (BCubed F₁ above 0.60). We find that the local and the global levels are mutually beneficial to induce concepts and also senses in our setting. Finally, we create static embeddings representing our induced concepts and use them on the Word-in-Context task, obtaining competitive performance with the State-of-the-Art.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.156
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2684–2696
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/sigarab-more-entries-6621/2024.emnlp-main.156/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.156
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bastien Liétard, Pascal Denis, and Mikaela Keller. 2024. To Word Senses and Beyond: Inducing Concepts with Contextualized Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2684–2696, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
To Word Senses and Beyond: Inducing Concepts with Contextualized Language Models (Liétard et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/sigarab-more-entries-6621/2024.emnlp-main.156.pdf