I recently posted a query to this list asking for pointers to "any
recent (2004 or later) results bearing on the usefulness of word sense
disambiguation (WSD) for end-user applications (such as machine
translation or question answering, and excluding WSD in support of
NLP-internal tasks such as parsing, semantic role labeling, learning
selectional preferences, etc.)." I'd like to express my thanks to
Chris Brew, Chris Callison-Burch, Katrin Erk, Jesus Jimenez, Rada
Mihalcea, Paul Rayson, and Luis Villarejo for their replies. Here's
my attempt at organizing/summarizing.
One category of responses concerned recent work on using WSD
techniques in connection with lexical selection in MT (with or without
an explicit sense inventory). Relevant references include:
Clara Cabezas and Philip Resnik, ``Using WSD Techniques for Lexical
Selection in Statistical Machine Translation'', Technical report
CS-TR-4736/LAMP-TR-124/UMIACS-TR-2005-42, July 2005.
http://lampsrv01.umiacs.umd.edu/pubs/TechReports/LAMP_124/LAMP_124.pdf
Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. "Word Sense Disambiguation
vs. Statistical Machine Translation". 43rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005). Ann Arbor, MI:
Jun 2005.
Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. "Evaluating the Word Sense
Disambiguation Performance of Statistical Machine
Translation". Second International Joint Conference on Natural
Language Processing (IJCNLP-2005). Jeju, Korea: Oct 2005.
Je'su's Gime'nez, Llui's Ma'rquez, and German Rigau, Automatic
Translation of WordNet Glosses. (EUROLAN'05 Cross-Language Knowledge
Induction Workshop), July 2005.
http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~jgimenez/PUBS/eurolan2005-gmr.pdf
D. Vickrey, L. Biewald, M. Teyssier, and D. Koller. "Word-Sense
Disambiguation for Machine Translation." Conference on Empirical
Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2005.
http://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/papers.cgi?topic=9
Another set of references concerns use of WSD-like tagging of semantic
categories in applications involving "interpretation of results" by
the user, such as requirements engineering, content analysis,
dictionary search tools, and providing assistance for human
translators.
Lo"fberg L, Juntunen J-P, Nykanen A, Varantola K, Rayson P, Archer
D. (2004). Using a semantic tagger as dictionary search tool. In
Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX
(European Association for Lexicography) International Congress
(Euralex 2004), Lorient, France, 6-10 July 2004. Universite' de
Bretagne Sud. Volume I, pp. 127-134.
S. Sharoff, P. Rayson, O. Mudraya, A. Wilson and T. McEnery
(2004). A tool for assisting translators using automatic semantic
annotation. Presented at Corpus Use and Learning to Translate
(CULT-BCN) Barcelona, January 22nd-24th 2004.
Sawyer, P., Rayson, P. and Cosh, K. (forthcoming) Shallow Knowledge
as an Aid to Deep Understanding in Early-Phase Requirements
Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Two replies related to enabling tasks, not end-user applications per se:
Colin Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch. "Paraphrasing with bilingual
parallel corpora." ACL-2005.
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~ccb/publications/ACL_2005a.pdf. They
"found that WSD played an important role, though only did simulated
WSD rather than doing it properly" (Chris C-B, p.c.)
Katrin Erk is "working on the automatic assignment of FrameNet
frames, which can be seen as a WSD task", and she suggested looking
at Tatu and Moldovan, "A Semantic Approach to Recognizing Textual
Entailment" (EMNLP-2005). She also mentioned related work aimed at
using FrameNet for Question Answering:
http://www.springerlink.com/(k23eicebjg3n5w45qp0frc45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,42;journal,579,2263;linkingpublicationresults,1:105633,1
Finally, Chris Brew kindly suggested four other places/directions in
which to look for applications: ICALL (Intelligent Computer-Aided
Language Learning); support for lexicographers; support for librarians
assigning Library of Congress labels (or similar) to books (or
similar); disambiguation of user queries to search engines in order to
place ads within the search results. (If anyone has specific recent
references related to these suggestions I'd love to know what they
are.)
Thanks again to everyone for their responses!
Philip
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Philip Resnik, Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
1401 Marie Mount Hall UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760
University of Maryland Linguistics phone: (301) 405-8903
College Park, MD 20742 USA Fax: (301) 314-2644 / (301) 405-7104
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik E-mail: resnik@umiacs.umd.edu
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