Understanding the role of conceptual relations in Word Sense Disambiguation

In this article, we concentrate in conceptual relations as a source of information for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems. We start with a review the most relevant research in the field, then we implement our own algorithm. As a starting point we have chosen the conceptual density algorithm of Agirre and Rigau. We generalize the original algorithm, parameterizing many aspects. This new algorithm obtains a relative improvement of 24% in terms of precision and recall. We also offer comparative evaluation of our system with respect to the participants in the SENSEVAL-2 disambiguation competition.We conclude that conceptual relations provide a source of information that is insufficient by itself to achieve good disambiguation results, but can, however, be a very accurate heuristic in a combined system.

Research highlights
► Conceptual relations can be exploited for word sense disambiguation purposes.
► Previous conceptual density disambiguation algorithms are expanded.
► Interesting parameter values that improve the original algorithm are discovered.
► Results are compared with the SENSEVAL-2 disambiguation competition participants.