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A comparative study between possibilistic and probabilistic approaches for monolingual word sense disambiguation

Knowledge and Information Systems volume 44, pages 91–126 (2015)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper proposes and assesses a new possibilistic approach for automatic monolingual word sense disambiguation (WSD). In fact, in spite of their advantages, the traditional dictionaries suffer from the lack of accurate information useful for WSD. Moreover, there exists a lack of high-coverage semantically labeled corpora on which methods of learning could be trained. For these multiple reasons, it became important to use a semantic dictionary of contexts (SDC) ensuring the machine learning in a semantic platform of WSD. Our approach combines traditional dictionaries and labeled corpora to build a SDC and identify the sense of a word by using a possibilistic matching model. Besides, we present and evaluate a second new probabilistic approach for automatic monolingual WSD. This approach uses and extends an existing probabilistic semantic distance to compute similarities between words by exploiting a semantic graph of a traditional dictionary and the SDC. To assess and compare these two approaches, we performed experiments on the standard ROMANSEVAL test collection and we compared our results to some existing French monolingual WSD systems. Experiments showed an encouraging improvement in terms of disambiguation rates of French words. These results reveal the contribution of possibility theory as a mean to treat imprecision in information systems.

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Notes

  1. http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/projects/romanseval.

  2. http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger/.

  3. http://wt.jrc.it/lt/Acquis/.

  4. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.

  5. http://americannationalcorpus.org/.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose relevant comments and convincing remarks helped us improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RIADI Research Laboratory, ENSI Manouba University, 2010 , Manouba, Tunisia

    Bilel Elayeb, Oussama Ben Khiroun & Narjès Bellamine Ben Saoud

  2. Emirates College of Technology, P.O. Box: 41009, Abu Dhabi, UAE

    Bilel Elayeb

  3. LISI Research Laboratory, ISD Manouba University, 2010 , Manouba, Tunisia

    Ibrahim Bounhas

  4. Informatics Research Institute of Toulouse (IRIT), 02 Rue Camichel, 31071 , Toulouse, France

    Fabrice Evrard

Authors
  1. Bilel Elayeb
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  2. Ibrahim Bounhas
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  3. Oussama Ben Khiroun
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  4. Fabrice Evrard
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  5. Narjès Bellamine Ben Saoud
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Correspondence to Bilel Elayeb.

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Elayeb, B., Bounhas, I., Ben Khiroun, O. et al. A comparative study between possibilistic and probabilistic approaches for monolingual word sense disambiguation. Knowl Inf Syst 44, 91–126 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0753-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0753-z

Keywords

  • Word sense disambiguation
  • Possibility theory
  • Probability theory
  • Semantic dictionary of contexts
  • Semantic graph