Fuzzy Logic for Inculcating Significance of Semantic Relations in Word Sense Disambiguation Using a WordNet Graph

Abstract

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) refers to the task of finding the intended meaning of a word in a given sentence. WordNet® (lexical database based on psychological principals) based on WSD methods have been discussed extensively. WordNet® relates words through various relations and all the WSD approaches available in the literature till date rely on the notion of assigning equal importance to each relation. But actually in real-world situations, these relations do not exhibit equal importance, so they should not be given equal weight. The paper presents a novel method for exploiting the idea of WordNet® relations weight based on its importance and thus assigns the weights to the edges of the WordNet® graph, µ ∊ (0, 1]. This helps in fuzzifying the WordNet® graph, where nodes represent the words and weighted edges represent the relation of the words with strength∈ (0,1]. The values for edge weight assignment are obtained using test cases based on a simulated annealing method. The proposed method utilizes various Fuzzy graph connectivity measures to determine the significance of each node in the Fuzzy graph, resulting in identification of the intended meaning of the word. This method is tested on the SemCor dataset and observed that it gives better results when compared to state-of-the-art approaches.