Using Cycles and Quasi-Cycles to Disambiguate Dictionary Glosses

We present a novel graph-based algorithm for the automated disambiguation of glosses in lexical knowledge resources. A dictionary graph is built starting from senses (vertices) and explicit or implicit relations in the dictionary (edges). The approach is based on the identification of edge sequences which constitute cycles in the dictionary graph (possibly with one edge reversed) and relate a source to a target word sense. Experiments are performed on the disambiguation of ambiguous words in the glosses of WordNet and two machine-readable dictionaries.