Question: What is the purpose of Word Sense Disambiguation?
Evidence: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental task and long-standing challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to find the exact sense of an ambiguous word in a particular context BIBREF0. Previous WSD approaches can be grouped into two main categories: knowledge-based and supervised methods.
Knowledge-based WSD methods rely on lexical resources like WordNet BIBREF1 and usually exploit two kinds of lexical knowledge. The gloss, which defines a word sense meaning, is first utilized in Lesk algorithm BIBREF2 and then widely taken into account in many other approaches BIBREF3, BIBREF4. Besides, structural properties of semantic graphs are mainly used in graph-based algorithms BIBREF5, BIBREF6.
Traditional supervised WSD methods BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9 focus on extracting manually designed features and then train a dedicated classifier (word expert) for every target lemma.
Although word expert supervised WSD methods perform better, they are less flexible than knowledge-based methods in the all-words WSD task BIBREF10. Recent neural-based methods are devoted to dealing with this problem. BIBREF11 present a supervised classifier based on Bi-LSTM, which shares parameters among all word types except the last layer. BIBREF10 convert WSD task to a sequence labeling task, thus building a unified model for all polysemous words. However, neither of them can totally beat the best word expert supervised methods.
More recently, BIBREF12 propose to leverage the gloss information from WordNet and model the semantic relationship between the context and gloss in an improved memory network. Similarly, BIBREF13 introduce a (hierarchical) co-attention mechanism to generate co-dependent representations for the context and gloss. Their attempts prove that incorporating gloss knowledge into supervised WSD approach is helpful, but they still have not achieved much improvement, because they may not make full use of gloss knowledge.
In this paper, we focus on how to better leverage gloss information in a supervised neural WSD system. Recently, the pre-trained language models, such as ELMo BIBREF14 and BERT BIBREF15, have shown their effectiveness to alleviate the effort of feature engineering. Especially, BERT has achieved excellent results in question answering (QA) and natural language inference (NLI). We construct context-gloss pairs from glosses of all possible senses (in WordNet) of the target word, thus treating WSD task as a sentence-pair classification problem. We fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model and achieve new state-of-the-art results on WSD task. In particular, our contribution is two-fold:
1. We construct context-gloss pairs and propose three BERT-based models for WSD.
2. We fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model, and the experimental results on several English all-words WSD benchmark datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art systems.
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental task and long-standing challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to find the exact sense of an ambiguous word in a particular context (Navigli, 2009).
Answer: It aims to find the exact sense of an ambiguous word in a particular context.