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Gloss-based Semantic Similarity Metrics for

Predominant Sense Acquisition

Ryu Iida Nara Institute of Science and TechnologyDiana McCarthy and Rob Koeling University of Sussex

IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Word Sense Disambiguation Predominant sense acquisition

Exploited as a powerful back-off strategy for word sense disambiguation

McCarthy et al (2004): Achieved 64% precision on Senseval2 all-

words taskStrongly relies on linguistic resources such

as WordNet for calculating the semantic similarity

Difficulty: porting it to other languages

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Focus How to calculate the semantic

similarity score without semantic relations such as hyponym

Explore the potential use of the word definitions (glosses) instead of WordNet-style resources for porting McCarthy et al.’s method to other languages

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Table of contents

1. Task2. Related work: McCarthy et al (2004) 3. Gloss-based semantic similarity

metrics4. Experiments

WSD on the two datasets: EDR and Japanese Senseval2 task

5. Conclusion and future directions

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task

select the correct sense of the word appearing in the context

I ate fried chicken last Sunday.

sense id gloss1 a common farm bird that is kept for its meat and eggs2 the meat from this bird eaten as food3 informal someone who is not at all brave4 a game in which children must do something

dangerous to show that they are braveSupervised approaches have been

mainly applied to learn the context

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task (Cont’d)Estimate the most predominant sense

of a word regardless of its contextEnglish coarse-grained all words task

(2007)Choosing most frequent senses: 78.9%Best performing system: 82.5%

Systems using a first sense heuristic have relied on sense-tagged dataHowever, sense-tagged data is expensive

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 McCarthy et al. (2004)’s unsupervised approach Extract top N neighbour words of the target word acc

ording to the distributional similarity score (simds)

Calculate the prevalent score of each senseCalculate simds weighted by the semantic similarity score

(simss)Sum up all the weighted simds of top N neighboursSemantic similarity: estimated from linguistic resources

(e.g. WordNet)

Output the sense which has the maximum prevalent score

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 McCarthy et al. (2004)’s approach: An example

neighbour simds

turkey 0.1805meat 0.1781... ...tomato 0.1573

sense2: the meat from this bird eaten as food.sense3: informal someone who is not at all brave.

chicken

prevalence(sense2) = 0.0271 + 0.0365 + ... + 0.0157 = 0.152

distributional similarity score

0.20

0.10...

0.15simss(word, sense2)

0.0365

0.0157...

0.0271weighted simds

=

semantic similarity score (from WordNet)

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 McCarthy et al. (2004)’s approach: An example

neighbour simds

turkey 0.1805meat 0.1781... ...tomato 0.1573

simss(word, sense3)

0.010.02...0.01

weighted simds

0.00180.0037...0.0016

=

sense2: the meat from this bird eaten as food.sense3: informal someone who is not at all brave.

chicken

prevalence(sense3) = 0.0018 + 0.0037 + ... + 0.0016 = 0.023

prevalence(sense2) = 0.152

prevalence(sense2) > prevalence(sense3) predominant sense: sense2

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 ProblemWhile the McCarthy et al.’s method works wel

l for English, other inventories do no always have WordNet-style resources to tie the nearest neighbors to the sense inventory

While traditional dictionaries do not organise senses into synsets, they do typically have sense definitions (glosses) associated with the senses

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Gloss-based similarityCalculate similarity between two glosses in a

dictionary as semantic similarity

simlesk: simply calculate the overlap of the content words in the glosses of the two word senses

simDSlesk: use distributional similarity as an approximation of semantic distance between the words in the two glosses

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 lesk: Example

simlesk(chicken, turkey) = 2“meat” and “food” are overlapped in two glosses

word glosschicken

the meat from this bird eaten as food

turkey the meat from a turkey eaten as food

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 lesk: Example

simlesk(chicken, tomato) = 0No overlap in two glosses

word glosschicken

the meat from this bird eaten as food

tomato a round soft red fruit eaten raw or cooked as a vegetable

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008

simDSlesk (chicken, tomato)= 1/3 (0.1843 + 0.1001 + 0.1857) = 0.1557

DSlesk Calculate distributional similarity scores of

any pairs of nouns in two glosses

Output the average of the maximum distributional similarity of all the nouns in target word

simds(meat, fruit) = 0.1625, simds(meat, vegetable) = 0.1843,

simds(bird, fruit) = 0.1001, simds(bird, vegetable) = 0.0717,

simds(food, fruit) = 0.1857, simds(food, vegetable) = 0.1772

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 DSlesk

　

),(max),()( jinWSwsiDSlesk wswssimnwssim

j

),(max ji ggsim

)(ba　 )( ji gg: noun appearing in

ig iws: gloss of word sense

),(max||

1),( basimga

ggsim dsga gb

iji

ij

　

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Apply Gloss-based similarity to McCarthy et al.’s approach

neighbour simds

turkey 0.1805meat 0.1781... ...tomato 0.1573

simDSlesk(word, sense2)

0.34530.2323...0.1557

weighted simds

0.06230.0414...0.0245

=

sense2: the meat from this bird eaten as food.sense3: informal someone who is not at all brave.

chicken

prevalence(sense2) = 0.0623 + 0.0414 + ... + 0.0245 = 0.2387

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Table of contents1. Task

2. Related work: McCarthy et al (2004)

3. Gloss-based semantic similarity metrics

4. Experiments WSD on the two datasets: EDR and

Japanese Senseval2 task5. Conclusion and future directions

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Experiment 1: EDRDataset: EDR corpus

3,836 polysemous nouns (183,502 instances)Adopt the similarity score proposed by Lin (1

998) as the distributional similarity score9-years Mainichi newspaper articles and 10-years

Nikkei newspaper articlesJapanese dependency parser CaboCha (Kudo and

Matsumoto, 2002)Use 50 nearest neighbors in line with McCart

hy et al. (2004)

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 MethodsBaseline

Select one word sense at random for each word token and average the precision over 100 trials

Unsupervised: McCarthy et al. (2004)Semantic similarity:

Jiang and Conrath (1997) (jcn), lesk, DSlesk

Supervised (Majority)Use hand-labeled training data for obtaining the p

redominant sense of the test words

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Results: EDR

DSlesk is comparable to jcn without the requirement for semantic relations such as hyponymy

recall precisionbaseline 0.402 0.402jcn 0.495 0.495lesk 0.474 0.488DSlesk 0.495 0.495upper-bound 0.745 0.745supervised 0.731 0.731

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Results: EDR (Cont’d)

All methods for finding a predominant sense outperform the supervised one for item with little data (≤ 5), indicating that these methods robustly work even for low frequency data where hand-tagged data is unreliable

all freq ≤ 10 freq ≤ 5baseline 0.402 0.405 0.402jcn 0.495 0.445 0.431lesk 0.474 0.448 0.426DSlesk 0.495 0.453 0.433upper-bound 0.745 0.674 0.639supervised 0.731 0.519 0.367

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Experiment 2 and Results: Senseval2 in Japanese50 nouns (5,000 instances)4 methods

lesk, DSlesk, baseline, supervised

fine-grained coarse-grainedbaseline 0.282 0.399lesk 0.344 0.501DSlesk 0.386 0.593upper-bound 0.747 0.834supervised 0.742 0.842

precision = recall

sense-id: 105-0-0-2-0 fine-grainedcoarse-grained

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 ConclusionWe examined different measures of semantic

similarity for finding a first sense heuristic for WSD automatically in Japanese

We defined a new gloss-based similarity (DSlesk) and evaluated the performance on two Japanese WSD datasets (EDR and Senseval2), outperforming lesk and achieving a performance comparable to the jcn method which relies on hyponym links which are not always available

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IJCNLP2008 Jan 10, 2008 Future directionsExplore other information in the glosses, suc

h as words of other POS and predicate-argument relations

Group fine-grained word senses into clusters, making the task suitable for NLP applications (Ide and Wilks, 2006)

Use the results of predominant sense acquisition as a prior knowledge of other approachesGraph-based approaches (Mihalcea 2005, Nasta

se 2008)