Unsupervised Does Not Mean Uninterpretable: The Case for Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation

Alexander Panchenko, Eugen Ruppert, Stefano Faralli, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Chris Biemann


Abstract
The current trend in NLP is the use of highly opaque models, e.g. neural networks and word embeddings. While these models yield state-of-the-art results on a range of tasks, their drawback is poor interpretability. On the example of word sense induction and disambiguation (WSID), we show that it is possible to develop an interpretable model that matches the state-of-the-art models in accuracy. Namely, we present an unsupervised, knowledge-free WSID approach, which is interpretable at three levels: word sense inventory, sense feature representations, and disambiguation procedure. Experiments show that our model performs on par with state-of-the-art word sense embeddings and other unsupervised systems while offering the possibility to justify its decisions in human-readable form.
Anthology ID:
E17-1009
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–98
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1009
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Panchenko, Eugen Ruppert, Stefano Faralli, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, and Chris Biemann. 2017. Unsupervised Does Not Mean Uninterpretable: The Case for Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 86–98, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Does Not Mean Uninterpretable: The Case for Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation (Panchenko et al., EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1009.pdf