Neural Sequence Learning Models for Word Sense Disambiguation

TLDR: This work proposes and studies in depth a series of end-to-end neural architectures directly tailored to the task, from bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory to encoder-decoder models, and shows that sequence learning enables more versatile all-words models that consistently lead to state-of-the-art results, even against word experts with engineered features.

Abstract: Word Sense Disambiguation models exist in many flavors. Even though supervised ones tend to perform best in terms of accuracy, they often lose ground to more flexible knowledge-based solutions, which do not require training by a word expert for every disambiguation target. To bridge this gap we adopt a different perspective and rely on sequence learning to frame the disambiguation problem: we propose and study in depth a series of end-to-end neural architectures directly tailored to the task, from bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory to encoder-decoder models. Our extensive evaluation over standard benchmarks and in multiple languages shows that sequence learning enables more versatile all-words models that consistently lead to state-of-the-art results, even against word experts with engineered features.