Papers › Don't Neglect the Obvious: On the Role of Unambiguous Words in Word Sense Disambiguation

Don't Neglect the Obvious: On the Role of Unambiguous Words in Word Sense Disambiguation

29 Apr 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2004.14325archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Loureiro, Jose Camacho-Collados

State-of-the-art methods for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) combine two different features: the power of pre-trained language models and a propagation method to extend the coverage of such models. This propagation is needed as current sense-annotated corpora lack coverage of many instances in the underlying sense inventory (usually WordNet). At the same time, unambiguous words make for a large portion of all words in WordNet, while being poorly covered in existing sense-annotated corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple method to provide annotations for most unambiguous words in a large corpus. We introduce the UWA (Unambiguous Word Annotations) dataset and show how a state-of-the-art propagation-based model can use it to extend the coverage and quality of its word sense embeddings by a significant margin, improving on its original results on WSD.

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Word Sense Disambiguation

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