Using automatically acquired predominant senses for word sense disambiguation

In word sense disambiguation (WSD), the heuristic of choosing the most common sense is extremely powerful because the distribution of the senses of a word is often skewed. The first (or predominant) sense heuristic assumes the availability of hand-tagged data. Whilst there are hand-tagged corpora available for some languages, these are relatively small in size and many word forms either do not occur, or occur infrequently. In this paper we investigate the performance of an unsupervised first sense heuristic where predominant senses are acquired automatically from raw text. We evaluate on both the SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-3 English all-words data. For accurate WSD the first sense heuristic should be used only as a back-off, where the evidence from the context is not strong enough. In this paper however, we examine the performance of the automatically acquired first sense in isolation since it turned out that the first sense taken from SemCor outperformed many systems in SENSEVAL-2.