A Client/Server Architecture for Word Sense Disambiguation

A Client/Server Architecture for Word Sense Disambiguation Caroline Brun Xerox Research Centre Europe 6, chemin de Maupertuis 38240 Meylan France Caroline.Brun@xrce.xerox.com Abstract This paper presents a robust client/server implemen- tation of a word sense disambiguator for English. This system associates a word with its meaning in a given context using dictionaries as tagged corpora in order to extract semantic disambiguation rules. Semantic rules are used as input of a semantic appli- cation program which encodes a linguistic strategy in order to select the best disambiguation rule for the word to be disambiguated. The semantic dis- ambiguation rule application program is part of the client/server architecture enabling the processing of large corpora. 1 Introduction This paper describes the implementation of an on- line lexical semantic disambiguation system for En- glish within a client/server linguistic application. This system allows to select the meaning of a word given its context of appearance in a text segment, and addresses the general problem of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), (Ide et al90), (Gale et al. 92), (Gale et al. 93), (Leacock et al.93), (Yarowsky 95), (Ng et al. 96), (Resnik et al. 97), (Véronis et al. 98) and (Wilks et al. 98). The basic idea of the semantic disambiguation system described here is to use a dictionary, in our case, the Oxford-Hachette bilingual dictionary (OHFD), (Oxford 94), a bilingual English/French French/English dictionary designed initially for hu- mans but stored in SGML format, in order to extract a semantic disambiguation rule database. The dic- tionary is in effect used as a semantically tagged corpus. Once the semantic disambiguation database is avail- able, it becomes, as well as a dictionary and an on- tology, a resource used by the server to perform WSD on new input. A linguistic strategy was im- plemented in order to select the best matching dis- ambiguation rule in a given context. This implementation is a follow-up of the Seman- tic Dictionary Lookup (SDL) already implemented in this client/server system (Aimelet 98) and of the methods proposed in (Dini et al. 98) and (Dini et al. 99). The originality of our implementation lies in the rule selection strategy for application as well as in the use of the client/server characteristics to perform WSD. After a brief presentation of the client/server characteristics, we examine the imple- mentation of the WSD system. Then we describe the results obtained after evaluation of the system, and finally we conclude with the description of its applications and perspectives. 2 2.1Architecture of the system XeLDa: a linguistic client/server application XeLDa addresses the problem of a generic de- velopment framework for linguistic-based and linguistics-enriched applications, based on avail- able, as well as future research results. Potential applications include: translation aids over a net- work, on a desktop or a portable PC, syntax check- ing, terminology extraction, and authoring tools in general. This system provides developers and re- searchers with a common development architecture for the open and seamless integration of linguis- tic services. XeLDa offers different services such as dictionary lookup, …

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