tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "DISAMBIGUATING AND INTERPRETING VERB EFINITIONS"

Disambiguating these definitions consists of identifying the appropriate sense of 'with (that is, the type of semantic relation linking the VERB to the NP) and choosing, if possible, the appropriate senses of the VERB and the NP-head from among "all their W7 senses. For example, the disambiguation of the definition of angle(3,vi, l), to fish with a hook", determines that the relation between fish and hook is use of instrument. 1 It also determines that the intended sense of fish is (vi, l)-"to attempt to catch fish and the intended sense of cha°~c~fi~InAo)idag, urved p r l l ~. | DISAMBIGUATING AND INTERPRETING VERB DEFINITIONS Yael Ravin IBM . Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights New York 10598 e-mail Yael @ ABSTRACT To achieve our goal of building a comprehensive lexical database out of various on-line resources it is necessary to interpret and disambiguate the information found in these resources. In this paper we describe a Disambiguation Module which analyzes the content of dictionary definitions in particular definitions of the form to VERB with NP . We discuss the semantic relations holding between the head and the prepositional phrase in such structures as weir as our heunstics for ide nt dying these relations and for disambiguating the senses of the words involved. We present some results obtained by the Disambiguation Module and evaluate its rate of success as compared with results obtained from human judgements. INTRODUCTION The goal of the Lexical Systems Group at IBM s Watson Research Center is to create COMPLEX a lexical knowledge base in which word senses are identified endowed with appropriate lexical information and properly related to one another Byrd 1989 . Information for COMPLEX is derived from multiple lexical sources so senses in one source need to be related to appropriate senses in the other sources. Similarly the senses of defining words need to be disambiguated relative to the senses supplied for them by the various sources. See Klavans et al 1990. Sense-disambiguation of the words found in dictionary entries can be viewed as a subproblem of sense-disambiguation of text corpora in general since dictionaries are large corpora of phrases and sentences exhibiting a variety of ambiguities such as unresolved pronominal references attachment ambiguities and ellipsis. The resolution of these ambiguity problems in the context of dictionary definitions would directly benefit then resolution in other types of text. In order to solve the frroblem of lexical ambiguity in dictionary de-initions we are .