Word Sense Disambiguation by Refining Target Word Embedding

Abstract

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) which aims to identify the correct sense of a target word appearing in a specific context is essential for web text analysis. The use of glosses has been explored as a means for WSD. However, only a few works model the correlation between the target context and gloss. We add to the body of literature by presenting a model that employs a multi-head attention mechanism on deep contextual features of the target word and candidate glosses to refine the target word embedding. Furthermore, to encourage the model to learn the relevant part of target features that align with the correct gloss, we recursively alternate attention on target word features and that of candidate glosses to gradually extract the relevant contextual features of the target word, refining its representation and strengthening the final disambiguation results. Empirical studies on the five most commonly used benchmark datasets show that our proposed model is effective and achieves state-of-the-art results.