Word Sense Disambiguation with Neural Language Models
Determining the intended sense of words in text – word sense disambiguation (WSD) – is a long-standing problem in natural language processing. In this paper, we present WSD algorithms which use neural network language models to achieve state-of-the-art precision. Each of these methods learns to disambiguate word senses using only a set of word senses, a few example sentences for each sense taken from a licensed lexicon, and a large unlabeled text corpus. We classify based on cosine similarity of vectors derived from the contexts in unlabeled query and labeled example sentences. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results when using the WordNet sense inventory, and significantly better than baseline performance using the New Oxford American Dictionary inventory. The best performance was achieved by combining an LSTM language model with graph label propagation.