CE314/CE887 Lecture 11:
Word Sense Disambiguation
Annie Louis
November 24, 2016
(Some slides adapted from Nathan Schneider)
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Recap
We looked at word and syntax problems. Now we will move
towards semantics.
Stage 1: Semantics of words or lexical semantics
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Meaning
The grand goal of artificial intelligence
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machines that do not mindlessly process data
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... but that ultimately understand its meaning
But how do we know if we succeeded?
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Eliza
Joseph Weizenbaum wrote the computer program Eliza in 1969 to
demonstrate how easily people can be fooled into thinking that
machines have some deep understanding.
young woman: Men are all alike.
eliza: In what way?
young woman: They’re always bugging us about something specific or
other.
eliza: Can you think of a specific example?
young woman: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here?
young woman: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
eliza: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
young woman: It’s true. I’m unhappy.
eliza: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
Online demo: http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
What is meaning? What is understanding?
These are deep philosophical questions
NLP usually takes a more pragmatic view: can the computer
behave as though it understands (in order to do what we want)?
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Dialogue systems (e.g., Eliza)
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Machine translation
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Question answering
What issues will we face in building such systems?
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
A Concrete Goal
We would like to build
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a machine that answers questions in natural language.
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may have access to knowledge bases
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may have access to vast quantities of English text
Basically, a smarter Google
This is typically called Question Answering
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Semantics
To build our QA system we will need to deal with issues in
semantics, i.e., meaning.
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Lexical semantics: the meanings of individual words (this
week)
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Sentential semantics: how word meanings combine
Consider some examples to highlight problems in lexical semantics
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question
Question
When was Barack Obama born?
Text available to the machine
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961
This is easy.
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just phrase a Google query properly:
"Barack Obama was born on *"
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syntactic rules that convert questions into statements are
straight-forward
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question (2)
Question
What plants are native to Scotland?
Text available to the machine
A new chemical plant was opened in Scotland.
What is hard?
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same word form, different meanings (senses)
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we need to be able to disambiguate between them
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question (3)
Question
Where did David Cameron go on vacation?
Text available to the machine
David Cameron spent his holiday in Cornwall
What is hard?
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different word forms, the same meaning (synonyms)
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we need to be able to match them
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question (4)
Question
Which animals love to swim?
Text available to the machine
Polar bears love to swim in the freezing waters of the
Arctic.
What is hard?
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words can refer to a subset (hyponym) or superset
(hypernym) of the concept referred to by another word
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we need to have database of such A is-a B relationships,
called an ontology
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question (5)
Question
What is a good way to remove wine stains?
Text available to the machine
Salt is a great way to eliminate wine stains
What is hard?
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words may be related in other ways, including similarity and
gradation
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we need to be able to recognize these to give appropriate
responses
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example Question (6)
Question
Did Poland reduce its carbon emissions since 1989?
Text available to the machine
Due to the collapse of the industrial sector after the end
of communism in 1989, all countries in Central Europe
saw a fall in carbon emissions.
Poland is a country in Central Europe.
What is hard?
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we need to do inference
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a problem for sentential, not lexical, semantics
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
WordNet (Miller et al. 1990)
Some of these problems can be solved with a good ontology.
WordNet (English) is a hand-built resource containing 117,000
synsets: sets of synonymous words (See
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/)
Synsets are connected by relations such as
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hyponym/hypernym (IS-A: chair-furniture)
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meronym (PART-WHOLE: leg-chair)
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antonym (OPPOSITES: good-bad)
globalwordnet.org now lists wordnets in over 50 languages (but
variable size/quality/licensing)
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Example synset
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Synsets
(“synonym sets”, effectively senses) are the basic unit of
organization in WordNet.
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Each synset is specific to a POS
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Synonymous words belong to the same synset
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nouns (.n), verbs (.v), adjectives (.a, .s), or adverbs (.r).
car1 (car.n.01) = {car,auto,automobile}
Polysemous words belong to multiple synsets. Numbered
roughly in descending order of frequency.
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car1 vs. car4 = car vs. elevator car
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Relations
Synsets are organized into a network by several kinds of relations
including:
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Hypernymy (Is-A): hyponym {ambulance} is a kind of
hypernym car1
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Meronymy (Part-Whole): meronym {air bag} is a part of
holonym car1
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Word Sense Ambiguity
Not all problems can be solved by WordNet alone.
Polysemes: The same word form has multiple related meanings
He read his newspaper at breakfast.
John was a good man.
vs.
vs.
Murdoch owns many newspapers.
Bill was a good painter.
Homonyms: The same word has completely unrelated meanings
I put my money in the bank.
You can do it!
vs.
vs.
He rested at the bank of the river.
She bought a can of soda.
Not always possible to strongly separate them.
Laura is a bright student.
vs.
Annie Louis
These lights are bright.
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
How many senses?
Each meaning is a separate sense of the word
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2 min. exercise: How many senses does the word interest
have?
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
How many senses?
How many senses does the word interest have?
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She pays 3% interest on the loan.
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He showed a lot of interest in the painting.
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Microsoft purchased a controlling interest in Google.
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It is in the national interest to invade the Bahamas.
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I only have your best interest in mind.
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Playing chess is one of my interests.
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Business interests lobbied for the legislation.
Are these seven different senses? Four? Three? The distinction
between polysemy and homonymy not always clear!
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Lexicography (creating dictionaries) requires data
And takes decades to complete! In the picture: James Murray,
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Image credit: Wikipedia
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Lumping vs. Splitting
For any given word, lexicographer faces the choice:
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Lump usages into a small number of senses? or
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Split senses to reflect fine-grained distinctions?
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
WordNet senses for interest
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S1: a sense of concern with and curiosity about someone or
something, Synonym: involvement
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S2: the power of attracting or holding one’s interest (because
it is unusual or exciting etc.), Synonym: interestingness
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S3: a reason for wanting something done, Synonym: sake
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S4: a fixed charge for borrowing money; usually a percentage
of the amount borrowed
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S5: a diversion that occupies one’s time and thoughts (usually
pleasantly), Synonyms: pastime, pursuit
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S6: a right or legal share of something; a financial
involvement with something, Synonym: stake
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S7: (usually plural) a social group whose members control
some field of activity and who have common aims, Synonym:
interest group
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Visualizing WordNet
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Word sense disambiguation (WSD)
For many applications, we would like to disambiguate senses
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we may be only interested in one sense
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searching for chemical plant on the web, we do not want to
know about chemicals in bananas
Task: Given a word, find the sense in a given context
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Popular topic, data driven methods perform well
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
WSD as classification
Given a word token in context, which sense (class) does it belong
to?
We can train a Naive Bayes classifier, assuming sense-labeled
training data:
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She pays 3% interest/INTEREST-MONEY on the loan.
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He showed a lot of interest/INTEREST-CURIOSITY in the
painting.
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Playing chess is one of my interests/INTEREST-HOBBY.
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
What features?
Directly neighboring words
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interest paid
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rising interest
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lifelong interest
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interest rate
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interest piqued
Any content words in a 50 word window
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pastime
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financial
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lobbied
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pursued
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Evaluation
Extrinsic: test as part of information retrieval, question answering,
or machine translation system
Intrinsic: evaluate classification accuracy or precision/recall
against gold-standard senses
Baseline: choose the most frequent sense (sometimes hard to
beat)
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Issues with WSD
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Not always clear how fine-grained the gold-standard should be
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Difficult/expensive to annotate corpora with fine-grained
senses
Classifiers must be trained separately for each word
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Hard to learn anything for infrequent or unseen words
Requires new annotations for each new word
Motivates other less intensive approaches.
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Dictionary based method: Lesk’s Algorithm (1986)
Use dictionary entries to perform disambiguation.
For example, given:
The bank can guarantee deposits will eventually cover future
tuition costs because it invests in adjustable-rate mortgage
securities.
1. Extract the context words (only content words)
2. Compare to dictionary definitions/examples for different senses
3. Pick the most matching sense
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation
Lesk algorithm example
The bank can guarantee deposits will eventually cover future
tuition costs because it invests in adjustable-rate mortgage
securities.
bank1
bank2
Gloss: a financial institution that accepts deposits and
channels the money into lending activities
Examples: he cashed a check at the bank,
that bank holds the mortgage on my home
Gloss: sloping land, especially the slope beside a body of
water
Examples: they pulled the canoe up on the bank,
he sat on the bank of the river and watched the currents
bank1 → 2 matching words
bank2 → 0 matches
So select bank1 .
Annie Louis
CE314/CE887 Lecture 11: Word Sense Disambiguation