Estimating and exploiting the entropy of sense distributions

Peng Jin, Diana McCarthy, Rob Koeling, John Carroll

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Word sense distributions are usually skewed. Predicting the extent of the skew can help a word sense disambiguation (WSD) system determine whether to consider evidence from the local context or apply the simple yet effective heuristic of using the first (most frequent) sense. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the entropy of a sense distribution to boost the precision of a first sense heuristic by restricting its application to words with lower entropy. We show on two standard datasets that automatic prediction of entropy can increase the performance of an automatic first sense heuristic.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNAACL-HLT 2009 - Human Language Technologies
Subtitle of host publication2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Short Papers
EditorsMari Ostendorf, Michael Collins, Shri Narayanan, Douglas W. Oard, Lucy Vanderwende
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages233-236
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781932432428
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2009 - Boulder, United States
Duration: May 31 2009Jun 5 2009

Publication series

NameNAACL-HLT 2009 - Human Language Technologies: 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Short Papers

Conference

Conference2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoulder
Period05/31/0906/5/09

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