Ricerc@Sapienza

Current research in knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) indicates that performances depend heavily on the Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB) employed. This paper introduces SyntagNet, a novel resource consisting of manually disambiguated lexical-semantic combinations. By capturing sense distinctions evoked by syntagmatic relations, SyntagNet enables knowledge-based WSD systems to establish a new state of the art which challenges the hitherto unrivaled performances attained by supervised approaches.

Exploiting syntagmatic information is an encouraging research focus to be pursued in an effort to close the gap between knowledge-based and supervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) performance. We follow this direction in our next-generation knowledge-based WSD system, SyntagRank, which we make available via a Web interface and a RESTful API. SyntagRank leverages the disambiguated pairs of co-occurring words included in SyntagNet, a lexical-semantic combination resource, to perform state-of-the-art knowledge-based WSD in a multilingual setting.