Polyword net: A word sense disambiguation specific word net of polysemy words

Abstract

This dissertation presents a new lexical resource which is named as 'PolyWordNet'. The PolyWordNet mimics the way how the senses of polysemy words and their corresponding related words are organized in a human mind. A related word of a sense of a polysemy word in a given context is a word that can disambiguate the meaning of the sense of the polysemy word in that context. The rationale behind the organization of words in PolyWordNet is that any simple sentence, which contains a polysemy word, also contains at least a related word (s). A sense of a polysemy word and its related word(s) in a sentence, therefore, have a strong semantic relation which can be used to disambiguate the sense of the polysemy word. Utilizing this semantic relation, PolyWordNet organizes the senses of polysemy words based on their corresponding related words. The organization of words in PolyWordNet is completely different as compared to the existing other popular lexical resources such as dictionary and WordNet. The words in a dictionary are organized based on the alphabetical order. Therefore, the words that spell alike come together but the words with similar meaning get scattered in the dictionary. In WordNet, the words with similar meaning are placed together based on the synonymy set. The polysemy words are the big problems in Natural Language Processing tasks since they create the ambiguity. No lexical databases deals with the organization of words based on these polysemy words. Therefore, the PolyWordNet is developed. The words in PolyWordNet are organized in such a way that the senses of polysemy words and their corresponding related words come together and form clusters. The results obtained from 63 runs of experiments performed on 3,541 words and tested by 4,105 different test sentences show the word organization of PolyWordNet is better for word sense disambiguation. These results also indicate that the word organization of PolyWordNet is acceptable and valid with reference to the popular lexical database- WordNet.