Jump to Content

Unsupervised Translation Sense Clustering

Mohit Bansal
John DeNero
Dekang Lin
the North American Association of Computational Linguistics (2012)

Abstract

We propose an unsupervised method for clustering the translations of a word, such that the translations in each cluster share a common semantic sense. Words are assigned to clusters based on their usage distribution in large monolingual and parallel corpora using the soft K-Means algorithm. In addition to describing our approach, we formalize the task of translation sense clustering and describe a procedure that leverages WordNet for evaluation. By comparing our induced clusters to reference clusters generated from WordNet, we demonstrate that our method effectively identifies sense-based translation clusters and benefits from both monolingual and parallel corpora. Finally, we describe a method for annotating clusters with usage examples.