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I don't believe in word senses

What it is about

The paper argues that word senses are not given facts that a word-sense disambiguation (WSD) system can look up. Senses are abstractions over clusters of corpus citations, and the clustering depends on the purpose of the work, so senses exist only relative to a task. The worked example is "handbag". In the British National Corpus it occurs 609 times, with 103 plural uses, 1 "handbagging" and 2 "handbagged", and about 97% of the citations are the plain base sense. The rarer uses, such as a music genre, a weapon and the phrase "dance round your handbag" that occurs just twice, are left out of dictionaries because of frequency and space. The paper concludes that a fixed list of senses from one dictionary is a weak basis for WSD evaluation.

Ideas

For Mova

The code is onto/src/wsd.rs for senses and prag for expressions, with en for the citations from the school silver corpus. The chapters are 19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register and 37-register-and-variation.md. The paper's examples come from the BNC, which is for tests and comparison only, never for the build. Measure first: WSD accuracy on the hand-checked sample, with the paper's per-task point made explicit in the report.

Topics: Word sense disambiguation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1023/a:1000583911091 · arXiv cmp-lg/9712006

@inproceedings{kilgarriff1997i,
  title = {{I don't believe in word senses}},
  author = {Kilgarriff, Adam},
  booktitle = {Computers and the Humanities 31(2), 1997 (препринт ITRI-97-12)},
  year = {1997},
  doi = {10.1023/a:1000583911091},
  eprint = {cmp-lg/9712006},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1000583911091}
}

References

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