Construct a graph of words step by step |
Graph a particular word |
Find a cluster which a word belongs to |
This work is important for developing automatic dictionaries. For example, in medical research, many many expert hours are devoted to reading documents and marking the occurence of new terms for diseases, syndromes and drugs. Due to the sheer volume of new information available every day, automatic methods are needed to classify new words, especially in languages other than English.
The following diagram shows the sort of results we obtain, directly from free-text and without human intervention.
Note the different clusters or components. We can infer from this that arms can refer to both body-parts and weapons.
This sort of technology can be used to identify the meanings of
ambigous words and automatically work out which meaning is being used
in a particular situation. Pretty neat, huh?
| Graph a particular word | Construct a graph of words step by step | Find a cluster which a word belongs to |
You can find out more in the following paper:
Dominic Widdows and Beate Dorow. A Graph Model for Unsupervised Lexical Acquisition. 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Taipei, August 2002, pages 1093-1099. (.ps)