Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation of Biomedical Documents

Abstract — Word Sense Disambiguation is the task of automatically identifying the correct sense of an ambiguous word. Biomedical documents, similar to other narrative documents, suffer from ambiguity, which impacts the ability to automatically extract knowledge contained in the document text. In this study, we propose a graph-based word sense disambiguation algorithm focused on biomedical text. The proposed algorithm uses the UMLS Metathesaurus as its source of knowledge. Evaluation is carried out using the MSH-WSD data set. Keywords—Word Sense Disambiguation; UMLS; MetaMap I