Republic of KOREA

This paper describes a method for disambiguating word senses by using semi-automatically constructed ontology. The ontology stores rich semantic constraints among 1,110 concepts, and enables a natural language processing system to resolve semantic ambiguities by making inferences with the concept network of the ontology. In order to acquire a reasonably practical ontology in limited time and with less manpower, we extend the existing Kadokawa thesaurus by inserting additional semantic relations into its hierarchy, which are classified as case relations and other semantic relations. The former can be obtained by converting valency information and case frames from previously-built electronic dictionaries used in machine translation. The latter can be acquired from concept co-occurrence information, which is extracted automatically from large corpora. In our practical machine translation system, our word sense disambiguation method achieved a 9.2 % improvement over methods which do not use an ontology for Korean translation