Question: Is their method transferable?
Evidence: Words with multiple senses commonly exist in many languages. For example, the word bank can either mean a “financial establishment” or “the land alongside or sloping down to a river or lake”, based on different contexts. Such a word is called a “polyseme”. The task to identify the meaning of a polyseme in its surrounding context is called word sense disambiguation (WSD). Word sense disambiguation is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP), and has broad applications in other NLP problems such as machine translation BIBREF0 . Lexical sample task and all-word task are the two main branches of WSD problem. The former focuses on only a pre-selected set of polysemes whereas the later intends to disambiguate every polyseme in the entire text. Numerous works have been devoted in WSD task, including supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and knowledge based learning BIBREF1 . Our work focuses on using supervised learning to solve all-word WSD problem.
Most supervised approaches focus on extracting features from words in the context. Early approaches mostly depend on hand-crafted features. For example, IMS by BIBREF2 uses POS tags, surrounding words and collections of local words as features. These approaches are later improved by combining with word embedding features BIBREF0 , which better represents the words' semantic information in a real-value space. However, these methods neglect the valuable positional information between the words in the sequence BIBREF3 . The bi-directional Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) approach by BIBREF3 provides one way to leverage the order of words. Recently, BIBREF4 improved the performance by pre-training a LSTM language model with a large unlabelled corpus, and using this model to generate sense vectors for further WSD predictions. However, LSTM significantly increases the computational complexity during the training process.
The development of the so called “fixed-size ordinally forgetting encoding” (FOFE) has enabled us to consider more efficient method. As firstly proposed in BIBREF5 , FOFE provides a way to encode the entire sequence of words of variable length into an almost unique fixed-size representation, while also retain the positional information for words in the sequence. FOFE has been applied to several NLP problems in the past, such as language model BIBREF5 , named entity recognition BIBREF6 , and word embedding BIBREF7 . The promising results demonstrated by the FOFE approach in these areas inspired us to apply FOFE in solving the WSD problem. In this paper, we will first describe how FOFE is used to encode sequence of any length into a fixed-size representation. Next, we elaborate on how a pseudo language model is trained with the FOFE encoding from unlabelled data for the purpose of context abstraction, and how a classifier for each polyseme is built from context abstractions of its labelled training data. Lastly, we provide the experiment results of our method on several WSD data sets to justify the equivalent performance as the state-of-the-art approach.
We also show that the methodology can be used for transferring to entirely different tasks.
Answer: Yes.