Resolving Regular Polysemy in Named Entities
Shu-Kai Hsieh Yu-Hsiang Tseng Hsin-Yu Chou Ching-Wen Yang Yu-Yun Chang
Word sense disambiguation primarily addresses the lexical ambiguity of common
words based on a predefined sense inventory. Conversely, proper names are
usually considered to denote an ad-hoc real-world referent. Once the reference
is decided, the ambiguity is purportedly resolved. However, proper names also
exhibit ambiguities through appellativization, i.e., they act like common words
and may denote different aspects of their referents. We proposed to address the
ambiguities of proper names through the light of regular polysemy, which we
formalized as dot objects. This paper introduces a combined word sense
disambiguation (WSD) model for disambiguating common words against Chinese
Wordnet (CWN) and proper names as dot objects. The model leverages the
flexibility of a gloss-based model architecture, which takes advantage of the
glosses and example sentences of CWN. We show that the model achieves
competitive results on both common and proper nouns, even on a relatively
sparse sense dataset. Aside from being a performant WSD tool, the model further
facilitates the future development of the lexical resource.