Meta-Learning with Variational Semantic Memory for Word Sense Disambiguation

Yingjun Du, Nithin Holla, Xiantong Zhen, Cees Snoek, Ekaterina Shutova


Abstract
A critical challenge faced by supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the lack of large annotated datasets with sufficient coverage of words in their diversity of senses. This inspired recent research on few-shot WSD using meta-learning. While such work has successfully applied meta-learning to learn new word senses from very few examples, its performance still lags behind its fully-supervised counterpart. Aiming to further close this gap, we propose a model of semantic memory for WSD in a meta-learning setting. Semantic memory encapsulates prior experiences seen throughout the lifetime of the model, which aids better generalization in limited data settings. Our model is based on hierarchical variational inference and incorporates an adaptive memory update rule via a hypernetwork. We show our model advances the state of the art in few-shot WSD, supports effective learning in extremely data scarce (e.g. one-shot) scenarios and produces meaning prototypes that capture similar senses of distinct words.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.409
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5254–5268
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.409
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.409
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yingjun Du, Nithin Holla, Xiantong Zhen, Cees Snoek, and Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Meta-Learning with Variational Semantic Memory for Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5254–5268, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-Learning with Variational Semantic Memory for Word Sense Disambiguation (Du et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.409.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.409.mp4
Data
Word Sense Disambiguation: a Unified Evaluation Framework and Empirical Comparison