Word Sense Induction for Russian: Deep Study and Comparison with Dictionaries

Abstract

The assumption that senses are mutually disjoint and have clear boundaries has been drawn into doubt by several linguists and psychologists. The problem of word sense granularity is widely discussed both in lexicographic and in NLP studies. We aim to study word senses in the wild—in raw corpora— by performing word sense induction (WSI). WSI is the task of automatically inducing the different senses of a given word in the form of an unsupervised learning task with senses represented as clusters of token instances. In this paper, we compared four WSI techniques: Adaptive Skip-gram (AdaGram), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), clustering of contexts and clustering of synonyms. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated them and performed a deep study of the AdaGram method comparing AdaGram clusters for 126 words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) and their senses in published dictionaries. We found out that AdaGram is quite good at distinguishing homonyms and metaphoric meanings. It ignores disappearing and obsolete senses, but induces new and domain-specific senses which are sometimes absent in dictionaries. However it works better for nouns than for verbs, ignoring the structural differences (e.g. causative meanings or different government patterns). The Adagram database is available online: http://adagram.ll-cl.org/.