Call: Word Sense Disambiguation

Nancy Ide (ide@univ-aix.fr)
Sat, 11 Nov 1995 12:09:50 +0000

***** CALL FOR PAPERS ***** CALL FOR PAPERS ***** CALL FOR PAPERS *****

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
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Special issue
on
WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION

Guest Editors

Nancy Ide <ide@cs.vassar.edu>
Jean Veronis <veronis@univ-aix.fr>

The discrimination of word senses, word sense disambiguation (WSD), is
of prime importance for all areas involving computerized language
analysis, including corpus-based research, lexical studies, information
retrieval, machine translation, natural language processing, studies of
style and theme, authorship attribution, and applications such as hypertext
browsing.

As early as the late 1950's, WSD was recognized as a critical but
extremely difficult task for automated language analysis. The
intractability of the problem contributed to the abandoning of machine
translation research programs in the early 1960's, when one of the
pioneers in the field, Bar-Hillel, proclaimed that he could see no way
computer programs could ever determine, for example, the proper sense of
the word "pen" in the sentence "The box is in the pen". Nevertheless, in
the past 30 years researchers have continued to work on the WSD problem,
and although the problem is far from solved, considerable progress has
been made.

This special issue is intended to summarize the state of the art in WSD,
identify the main areas of difficulty, and suggest solutions for
improvement. Papers are invited on all areas of WSD, and especially on :

o large-scale knowledge sources for WSD. Given the difficulty of
building large-scale knowledge sources by hand, researchers have
turned to "ready-made" resources such as machine-readable
dictionaries and corpora. However, each of these kinds of resources
poses problems, and none covers definitively the areas required to
accomplish WSD.

o the problem of sense division. The disambiguation of word senses
involves, a priori, determining what the appropriate sense
distinctions for a given word are. Many studies have shown that the
kinds of sense distinctions made by most everyday dictionaries (and
even some computer dictionary resources such as WordNet) are too
finely-grained, and in some cases not even appropriate, to serve the
purposes of language analysis.

o combination of methods (statistical, rule-based) and knowledge
sources (associative, collocational, phrasal, morphosyntactic,
statistical, domain-related, etc.). It is now widely held that no
single approach is complete enough for WSD, and that a combination
of sources and methods is required. However, it remains to be
determined how to most effectively combine methods and knowledge for
WSD.

o assessment of the knowledge "needs" for WSD. There is no precise
quantitative study on what the knowledge "needs" are in order to
disambiguate a given word in a given context. For example, in the
sentences, "I write on the page", "I spoke to the page", "The front
page says..." it is obvious that different kinds of knowledge
contribute more or less to the proper (and/or easy) disambiguation
of "page" in the various contexts--i.e., the strong association
between "write" and "page", selectional restrictions on the verb
"speak", and collocational information for "front" and "page",
respectively.

All papers will be peer reviewed. Priority will be given to papers that
have a strong empirical background and report precise, quantitative
results.

SUBMISSIONS

Hard copy submissions should be on letter-size paper (8.5 x 11 inches, or
A4), double-spaced throughout, including footnotes and references. The
paper should begin with an informative abstract of 150-250 words.
Manuscripts must be written in English. Six copies should be sent to

Julia Hirschberg, CL Editor
AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Avenue, 2D-450
Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
(+1 908) 582-7496; acl@research.att.com

Submissions in electronic form (LaTeX) must conform to the Computational
Linguistics specifications, which can retrieved from

ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/CLstyle/clsubmission.tar.Z
or
http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/cmp-lg/papers/macros/cl-style/

Electronic submissions should be sent to <acl@research.att.com>.

All submissions must be received before April 1, 1996.
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Computational Linguistics is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the
Association for Computational Linguistics.