Exploiting aggregate properties of bilingual dictionaries for distinguishing senses of English words and inducing English sense clusters

  • Authors:

  • Charles Schafer;David Yarowsky

  • Affiliations:

  • Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

  • Venue:
  • ACLdemo '04 Proceedings of the ACL 2004 on Interactive poster and demonstration sessions
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We propose a novel method for inducing monolingual semantic hierarchies and sense clusters from numerous foreign-language-to-English bilingual dictionaries. The method exploits patterns of non-transitivity in translations across multiple languages. No complex or hierarchical structure is assumed or used in the input dictionaries: each is initially parsed into the "lowest common denominator" form, which is to say, a list of pairs of the form (foreign word, English word). We then propose a monolingual synonymy measure derived from this aggregate resource, which is used to derive multilingually-motivated sense hierarchies for monolingual English words, with potential applications in word sense classification, lexicography and statistical machine translation.