Deep contextual disambiguation of homonyms and polysemants

• Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 772 - 778
• Main Author: Vakulenko, Maksym O
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 31.05.2023
• ISSN: 2055-7671; 2055-768X
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqac081

Abstract A new metric method for word sense disambiguation is put forward, being formulated within a phenomenological analogy to the wave function of an observable quantity in quantum mechanics where the actual meaning of a multivalued word (a homonym or a polysemant) is determined by its context. The choice of the actualized sense is determined by the minimal semantic distance between the semantics of possible word senses and that of the context, where the meanings of the word in question and the context follow from their semantic fields based on lexicographic hyperchains. In contrast to the common models, our method accounts for semantic polarity. The formulated method showed good results in disentangling polysemy, which was not possible to achieve within the contextualized embedding approacdh based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT).