Now, It’s Personal : The Need for Personalized Word Sense Disambiguation

Authors of text tend to predominantly use a single sense for a lemma that can differ among different authors. This might not be captured with an author-agnostic word sense disambiguation (WSD) model that was trained on multiple authors. Our work finds that WordNet’s first senses, the predominant senses of our dataset’s genre, and the predominant senses of an author can all be different and therefore, author-agnostic models could perform well over the entire dataset, but poorly on individual authors. In this work, we explore methods for personalizing WSD models by tailoring existing state-of-the-art models toward an individual by exploiting the author’s sense distributions. We propose a novel WSD dataset and show that personalizing a WSD system with knowledge of an author’s sense distributions or predominant senses can greatly increase its performance.