Word Meaning and
Similarity
Word Senses and
Word Relations
Reminder: lemma and wordform
• A lemma or citation form
• Same stem, part of speech, rough semantics
• A wordform
• The “inflected” word as it appears in text
Wordform Lemma
banks bank
sung sing
duermes dormir
Lemmas have senses
• One lemma “bank” can have many meanings:
• …a bank can hold the investments in a custodial account…
Sense 1: • “…as agriculture
1 burgeons on the east bank the river will shrink
even more”
• Sense
Sense 2: (or word sense) 2
• A discrete representation
of an aspect of a word’s meaning.
• The lemma bank here has two senses
Homonymy
Homonyms: words that share a form but have unrelated,
distinct meanings:
• bank1: financial institution, bank2: sloping land
• bat1: club for hitting a ball, bat2: nocturnal flying mammal
1. Homographs (bank/bank, bat/bat)
2. Homophones:
1. Write and right
2. Piece and peace
Homonymy causes problems for NLP
applications
• Information retrieval
• “bat care”
• Machine Translation
• bat: murciélago (animal) or bate (for baseball)
• Text-to-Speech
• bass (stringed instrument) vs. bass (fish)
Polysemy
• 1. The bank was constructed in 1875 out of local red brick.
• 2. I withdrew the money from the bank
• Are those the same sense?
• Sense 2: “A financial institution”
• Sense 1: “The building belonging to a financial institution”
• A polysemous word has related meanings
• Most non-rare words have multiple meanings
Metonymy or Systematic Polysemy:
A systematic relationship between senses
• Lots of types of polysemy are systematic
• School, university, hospital
• All can mean the institution or the building.
• A systematic relationship:
• Building Organization
• Other such kinds of systematic polysemy:
Author (Jane Austen wrote Emma)
Works of Author (I love Jane Austen)
Tree (Plums have beautiful blossoms)
Fruit (I ate a preserved plum)
How do we know when a word has more than
one sense?
• The “zeugma” test: Two senses of serve?
• Which flights serve breakfast?
• Does Lufthansa serve Philadelphia?
• ?Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose?
• Since this conjunction sounds weird,
• we say that these are two different senses of “serve”
Synonyms
• Word that have the same meaning in some or all contexts.
• filbert / hazelnut
• couch / sofa
• big / large
• automobile / car
• vomit / throw up
• Water / H20
• Two lexemes are synonyms
• if they can be substituted for each other in all situations
• If so they have the same propositional meaning
Synonyms
• But there are few (or no) examples of perfect synonymy.
• Even if many aspects of meaning are identical
• Still may not preserve the acceptability based on notions of politeness, slang,
register, genre, etc.
• Example:
• Water/H20
• Big/large
• Brave/courageous
Synonymy is a relation
between senses rather than words
• Consider the words big and large
• Are they synonyms?
• How big is that plane?
• Would I be flying on a large or small plane?
• How about here:
• Miss Nelson became a kind of big sister to Benjamin.
• ?Miss Nelson became a kind of large sister to Benjamin.
• Why?
• big has a sense that means being older, or grown up
• large lacks this sense
Antonyms
• Senses that are opposites with respect to one feature of meaning
• Otherwise, they are very similar!
dark/light short/long fast/slow rise/fall
hot/cold up/down in/out
• More formally: antonyms can
• define a binary opposition
or be at opposite ends of a scale
• long/short, fast/slow
• Be reversives:
• rise/fall, up/down
Hyponymy and Hypernymy
• One sense is a hyponym of another if the first sense is more specific,
denoting a subclass of the other
• car is a hyponym of vehicle
• mango is a hyponym of fruit
• Conversely hypernym/superordinate (“hyper is super”)
• vehicle is a hypernym of car
• fruit is a hypernym of mango
Superordinate/hyper vehicle fruit furniture
Subordinate/hyponym car mango chair
Hyponymy more formally
• Extensional:
• The class denoted by the superordinate extensionally includes the class denoted by
the hyponym
• Entailment:
• A sense A is a hyponym of sense B if being an A entails being a B
• Hyponymy is usually transitive
• (A hypo B and B hypo C entails A hypo C)
• Another name: the IS-A hierarchy
• A IS-A B (or A ISA B)
• B subsumes A
Hyponyms and Instances
• WordNet has both classes and instances.
• An instance is an individual, a proper noun that is a unique entity
• San Francisco is an instance of city
• But city is a class
• city is a hyponym of municipality...location...
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Word Meaning and
Similarity
WordNet
Applications of Thesauri and Ontologies
• Information Extraction
• Information Retrieval
• Question Answering
• Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics
• Machine Translation
WordNet 3.0
• A hierarchically organized lexical database
• On-line thesaurus + aspects of a dictionary
• Some other languages available or under development
• (Arabic, Finnish, German, Portuguese…)
Category Unique Strings
Noun 117,798
Verb 11,529
Adjective 22,479
Adverb 4,481
Senses of “bass” in Wordnet
How is “sense” defined in WordNet?
• The synset (synonym set), the set of near-synonyms, instantiates a
sense or concept, with a gloss
• Example: chump as a noun with the gloss:
“a person who is gullible and easy to take advantage of”
• This sense of “chump” is shared by 9 words:
chump1, fool2, gull1, mark9, patsy1, fall guy1,
sucker1, soft touch1, mug2
• Each of these senses have this same gloss
• (Not every sense; sense 2 of gull is the aquatic bird)
WordNet Hypernym Hierarchy for “bass”
WordNet Noun Relations
WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION
• Correct sense of words in a particular use/context
• Automating this happened first in Machine Translation
• Weaver(1949) – outlined an approach
• that words can be disambiguated in context ONLY
Approaches
• Knowledge-based
• Corpus-based
KNOWLEDGE BASED APPROACH
• Uses a machine-readable dictionary/thesaurus
• LESK’S ALGORITHM
LESK’S ALGORITHM
• Finds the OVERLAP between the definitions of (ambiguous)words and
the context of ambiguous words
• Most likely SENSE is the one having large OVERLAP between senses
definition and the context
Example
The bank can guarantee deposits will eventually cover future tuition costs because it
invests in adjustable-rate mortgage securities.
• Appropriate sense of cone in the phrase pine cone
Example
Sense# Sense Sense Definition
S1 ash the residue that remains when the something is
burnt
S2 ash tree a variety of deciduous ornamental tree
S3 ash strong elastic wood used to make furniture and
sporting goods
We have to disambiguate the following two contexts:
1. The barn was burnt to ashes when the owner returned.
2. This table is made of ash wood
Sense# Sense Sense Definition
S1 ash the residue that remains when the something is burnt
S2 ash tree a variety of deciduous ornamental tree
S3 ash strong elastic wood used to make furniture and sporting goods
We have to disambiguate the following two contexts:
1 The barn was burnt to ashes when the owner returned.
2 This table is made of ash wood
Context Scores
S1 S2 S3
1 1 0 0
2 0 0 1
50-70% Accuracy
Alternative Approaches To Finding Similarity
Other Than Counting Common Words
• JACCARD’S COEFFICIENT
• DICE COEFFICIENT
• COSINE