LINGUIST List 2.719

Sun 27 Oct 1991

Disc: Word Senses

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Directory

1. Marti Hearst, 2.710 Queries
2. David D. Lewis, word sense disambiguation

(Moderators: if this is too long or not of general interest, I won't be
offended if you don't post it to the entire list.)
I'm replying to:
 2)
 Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1991 09:50:59 +0000
 From: Mark Sanderson <sandersodcs.glasgow.ac.uk>
 Subject: word sense disambiguation by people
 I am doing some research into word sense disambiguation applied to
 information retrieval. Recently I was reading a paper that said,
 "a number of researchers in text processing have observed that people can
 consistently determine the sense of a word simply by examining the half
 dozen or so words just before and after the word in focus."
 But then the paper doesn't seem to directly reference any papers mentioning
 this. I would really like to track down these papers, does anyone have a
 reference for them ?
I have several references for disambiguation via local context. The
Kelly and Stone is pioneer work on computational disambiguation,
although it focuses on part-of-speech disambiguation rather than
determining the sense given that the word has more than one meaning
with the same part of speech. The Choueka reference has experimental
evidence that human readers can disambiguate in this way. The next four
papers describe recent work that use this assumption to automatically
assign the correct sense. There is also work on using the surrounding
context of dictionary definitions, and I enclose a well-known
reference for this, by Lesk.
*I* would like references that show that word sense disambiguation is
useful for information retrieval. The only one that I know of is the
Krovetz reference that I list at the end, and that is inconclusive.
Do you have others?
Edward Kelly and Philip Stone, "Computer recognition of english word
senses", "North-Holland Linguistics Series", 13, "North-Holland",
"Amsterdam", 1975
Y. Choueka and S. Luisgnan, "Disambiguation by Short Contexts",
 "Computers and the Humanities", 19(3), 147-157,1985
Kenneth Church, (don't have title here), "The Proceedings of the 7th
Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New OED and Text Research:
Using Corpora", "Oxford", 1991
George A. Miller and Daniel A. Teibel, "A Proposal for Lexical
Disambiguation", "Proceedings of the DARPA Speech and Natural Language
Workshop", 1991
Uri Zernik, "TRAIN1 vs. TRAIN2: Tagging Word Senses in Corpus", RIAO
91 Conference Proceedings", Barcelona, Spain, 567-585, 1991
Marti A. Hearst, "Noun Homograph Disambiguation using Local Context in
Large Text Corpora", "The Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference of
the UW Centre for the New OED and Text Research: Using Corpora",
"Oxford", 1991
Michael Lesk, "Automatic Sense Disambiguation Using Machine Readable
Dictionaries: How to Tell a Pine Cone from an Ice Cream Cone,
"Proceedings of the 1986 SIGDOC Conference", 1987
Robert Krovetz and Bruce Croft, "Word Sense Disambiguation Using
Machine-Readable Dictionaries", Proceedings of the Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval",Cambridge, MA,
127-136, 1989
Marti Hearst
martiauspex.berkeley.edu

Re Mark Sanderson's query on word sense disambiguation using a small
number of words of context's there's a paper on this by Choueka and
Lusignan, "Disambiguation by Short Contexts", Computers and the
Humanities, 19, pp. 147--157, 1985. This isn't from the psych
literature however, as your mentioning of "focus" seemed to suggest.
David D. Lewis | net: lewistira.uchicago.edu
Center for Info. and Language Studies; U Chicago| ph. 312-702-6992
1100 E. 57th St.; JRL S-116 | fax. 312-702-0775
Chicago, IL 60637; USA |