In this paper, we present Watasense, an unsupervised system for word sense disambiguation. Given a sentence, the system chooses the most relevant sense of each input word with respect to the semantic similarity between the given sentence and the synset constituting the sense of the target word. Watasense has two modes of operation. The sparse mode uses the traditional vector space model to estimate the most similar word sense corresponding to its context. The dense mode, instead, uses synset embeddings to cope with the sparsity problem. We describe the architecture of the present system and also conduct its evaluation on three different lexical semantic resources for Russian. We found that the dense mode substantially outperforms the sparse one on all datasets according to the adjusted Rand index.
A new metaphor of two-dimensional text for data-driven semantic modeling of natural language is proposed, which provides an entirely new angle on the representation of text: not only syntagmatic relations are annotated in the text, but also paradigmatic relations are made explicit by generating lexical expansions. We operationalize distributional similarity in a general framework for large corpora, and describe a new method to generate similar terms in context. Our evaluation shows that distributional similarity is able to produce highquality lexical resources in an unsupervised and knowledge-free way, and that our highly scalable similarity measure yields better scores in a WordNet-based evaluation than previous measures for very large corpora. Evaluating on a lexical substitution task, we find that our contextualization method improves over a non-contextualized baseline across all parts of speech, and we show how the metaphor can be applied successfully to part-of-speech tagging. A number of ways to extend and improve the contextualization method within our framework are discussed. As opposed to comparable approaches, our framework defines a model of lexical expansions in context that can generate the expansions as opposed to ranking a given list, and thus does not require existing lexical-semantic resources.