Discrimination of Word Senses with Hypernyms

Languages are inherently ambiguous. Four out of five words in English have more than one meaning. Nowadays there is a growing number of small proprietary thesauri used for knowledge management for different applications. In order to enable the usage of these thesauri for automatic text annotations, we introduce a robust method for discriminating word senses using hypernyms. The method uses collocations to induce word senses and to discriminate the thesaural sense from the other senses by utilizing hypernym entries taken from a thesaurus. The main novelty of this work is the usage of hypernyms already at the stage sense induction. The hypernyms enable us to cast the task to a binary scenario, namely teasing apart thesaural senses from all the rest. The introduced method outperforms the baseline and has indicates accuracy above 80%.