Topic Models for Word Sense Disambiguation and Token-Based Idiom Detection

This paper presents a probabilistic model for sense disambiguation which chooses the best sense based on the conditional probability of sense paraphrases given a context. We use a topic model to decompose this conditional probability into two conditional probabilities with latent variables. We propose three different instantiations of the model for solving sense disambiguation problems with different degrees of resource availability. The proposed models are tested on three different tasks: coarse-grained word sense disambiguation, fine-grained word sense disambiguation, and detection of literal vs. nonliteral usages of potentially idiomatic expressions. In all three cases, we outperform state-of-the-art systems either quantitatively or statistically significantly.