Werdy: Recognition and Disambiguation of Verbs and Verb Phrases with Syntactic and Semantic Pruning

Word-sense recognition and disambiguation (WERD) is the task of identifying word phrases and their senses in natural language text. Though it is well understood how to disambiguate noun phrases, this task is much less studied for verbs and verbal phrases. We present Werdy, a framework for WERD with particular focus on verbs and verbal phrases. Our framework first identifies multi-word expressions based on the syntactic structure of the sentence; this allows us to recognize both contiguous and non-contiguous phrases. We then generate a list of candidate senses for each word or phrase, using novel syntactic and semantic pruning techniques. We also construct and leverage a new resource of pairs of senses for verbs and their object arguments. Finally, we feed the so-obtained candidate senses into standard word-sense disambiguation (WSD) methods, and boost their precision and recall. Our experiments indicate that Werdy significantly increases the performance of existing WSD methods.