A Game-Theoretic Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation

Rocco Tripodi, Marcello Pelillo


Abstract
This article presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are represented as classes. The words simultaneously update their class membership preferences according to the senses that neighboring words are likely to choose. We use distributional information to weigh the influence that each word has on the decisions of the others and semantic similarity information to measure the strength of compatibility among the choices. With this information we can formulate the word sense disambiguation problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and solve it using tools derived from game theory, maintaining the textual coherence. The model is based on two ideas: Similar words should be assigned to similar classes and the meaning of a word does not depend on all the words in a text but just on some of them. The article provides an in-depth motivation of the idea of modeling the word sense disambiguation problem in terms of game theory, which is illustrated by an example. The conclusion presents an extensive analysis on the combination of similarity measures to use in the framework and a comparison with state-of-the-art systems. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms and can be applied to different tasks and in different scenarios.
Anthology ID:
J17-1002
Volume:
Computational Linguistics, Volume 43, Issue 1 - April 2017
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
CL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
31–70
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/J17-1002
DOI:
10.1162/COLI_a_00274
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rocco Tripodi and Marcello Pelillo. 2017. A Game-Theoretic Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation. Computational Linguistics, 43(1):31–70.
Cite (Informal):
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation (Tripodi & Pelillo, CL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/J17-1002.pdf