Abstract

Example sentences provide an intuitive means of grasping the meaning of a word, and are frequently used to complement conventional word definitions. When a word has multiple meanings, it is useful to have example sentences for specific senses (and hence definitions) of that word rather than indiscriminately lumping all of them together. In this paper, we investigate to what extent such sense-specific example sentences can be extracted from parallel corpora using lexical knowledge bases for multiple languages as a sense index. We use word sense disambiguation heuristics and a cross-lingual measure of semantic similarity to link example sentences to specific word senses. From the sentences found for a given sense, an algorithm then selects a smaller subset that can be presented to end users, taking into account both representativeness and diversity. Preliminary results show that a precision of around 80 % can be obtained for a reasonable number of word senses, and that the subset selection yields convincing results.

Citations