[Corpora-List] Seeking new results on WSD in applications

[Philip Resnik]

I recently posted a query to this list asking for pointers to "any
recent (2004 or later) results bearing on the usefulness of word sense
disambiguation (WSD) for end-user applications (such as machine
translation or question answering, and excluding WSD in support of
NLP-internal tasks such as parsing, semantic role labeling, learning
selectional preferences, etc.)."  I'd like to express my thanks to
Chris Brew, Chris Callison-Burch, Katrin Erk, Jesus Jimenez, Rada
Mihalcea, Paul Rayson, and Luis Villarejo for their replies.  Here's
my attempt at organizing/summarizing.

One category of responses concerned recent work on using WSD
techniques in connection with lexical selection in MT (with or without
an explicit sense inventory).  Relevant references include:

  Clara Cabezas and Philip Resnik, ``Using WSD Techniques for Lexical
  Selection in Statistical Machine Translation'', Technical report
  CS-TR-4736/LAMP-TR-124/UMIACS-TR-2005-42, July 2005.
  http://lampsrv01.umiacs.umd.edu/pubs/TechReports/LAMP_124/LAMP_124.pdf

  Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. "Word Sense Disambiguation
  vs. Statistical Machine Translation". 43rd Annual Meeting of the
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005). Ann Arbor, MI:
  Jun 2005.

  Marine Carpuat and Dekai Wu. "Evaluating the Word Sense
  Disambiguation Performance of Statistical Machine
  Translation". Second International Joint Conference on Natural
  Language Processing (IJCNLP-2005). Jeju, Korea: Oct 2005.

  Je'su's Gime'nez, Llui's Ma'rquez, and German Rigau, Automatic
  Translation of WordNet Glosses. (EUROLAN'05 Cross-Language Knowledge
  Induction Workshop), July 2005.
  http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~jgimenez/PUBS/eurolan2005-gmr.pdf

  D. Vickrey, L. Biewald, M. Teyssier, and D. Koller. "Word-Sense
  Disambiguation for Machine Translation." Conference on Empirical
  Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2005.
  http://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/papers.cgi?topic=9

Another set of references concerns use of WSD-like tagging of semantic
categories in applications involving "interpretation of results" by
the user, such as requirements engineering, content analysis,
dictionary search tools, and providing assistance for human
translators.

  Lo"fberg L, Juntunen J-P, Nykanen A, Varantola K, Rayson P, Archer
  D. (2004). Using a semantic tagger as dictionary search tool. In
  Williams G. and Vessier S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX
  (European Association for Lexicography) International Congress
  (Euralex 2004), Lorient, France, 6-10 July 2004. Universite' de
  Bretagne Sud. Volume I, pp. 127-134.

  S. Sharoff, P. Rayson, O. Mudraya, A. Wilson and T. McEnery
  (2004). A tool for assisting translators using automatic semantic
  annotation. Presented at Corpus Use and Learning to Translate
  (CULT-BCN) Barcelona, January 22nd-24th 2004.

  Sawyer, P., Rayson, P. and Cosh, K. (forthcoming) Shallow Knowledge
  as an Aid to Deep Understanding in Early-Phase Requirements
  Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Two replies related to enabling tasks, not end-user applications per se:

  Colin Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch.  "Paraphrasing with bilingual
  parallel corpora." ACL-2005.
  http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~ccb/publications/ACL_2005a.pdf. They
  "found that WSD played an important role, though only did simulated
  WSD rather than doing it properly" (Chris C-B, p.c.)

  Katrin Erk is "working on the automatic assignment of FrameNet
  frames, which can be seen as a WSD task", and she suggested looking
  at Tatu and Moldovan, "A Semantic Approach to Recognizing Textual
  Entailment" (EMNLP-2005).  She also mentioned related work aimed at
  using FrameNet for Question Answering:
  http://www.springerlink.com/(k23eicebjg3n5w45qp0frc45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,42;journal,579,2263;linkingpublicationresults,1:105633,1

Finally, Chris Brew kindly suggested four other places/directions in
which to look for applications: ICALL (Intelligent Computer-Aided
Language Learning); support for lexicographers; support for librarians
assigning Library of Congress labels (or similar) to books (or
similar); disambiguation of user queries to search engines in order to
place ads within the search results.  (If anyone has specific recent
references related to these suggestions I'd love to know what they
are.)

Thanks again to everyone for their responses!

  Philip

  ----------------------------------------------------------------
  Philip Resnik, Associate Professor
  Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

  1401 Marie Mount Hall            UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760       
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