An Empirical Study on Class-Based Word Sense Disambiguation

As empirically demonstrated by the last SensEval exercises, assigning the appropriate meaning to words in context has resisted all attempts to be successfully addressed. One possible reason could be the use of inappropriate set of meanings. In fact, WordNet has been used as a de-facto standard repository of meanings. However, to our knowledge, the meanings represented by WordNet have been only used for WSD at a very fine-grained sense level or at a very coarse-grained class level. We suspect that selecting the appropriate level of abstraction could be on between both levels. We use a very simple method for deriving a small set of appropriate meanings using basic structural properties of WordNet. We also empirically demonstrate that this automatically derived set of meanings groups senses into an adequate level of abstraction in order to perform class-based Word Sense Disambiguation, allowing accuracy figures over 80%.