Using the multilingual central repository for graph-based word sense disambiguation

This paper presents the results of a graph-based method for performing knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). The technique exploits the structural properties of the graph underlying the chosen knowledge base. The method is general, in the sense that it is not tied to any particular knowledge base, but in this work we have applied it to the Multilingual Central Repository (MCR, (Atserias et al., 2004)). The evaluation has been performed on the Senseval-3 all-words task (Snyder and Palmer, 2004). The main contributions of the paper are twofold: (1) We have evaluated the separate and combined performance of each type of relation in the MCR, and thus indirectly validated the contents of the MCR and their potential for WSD. (2) We obtain state-of-the-art results, and in fact yield the best results that can be obtained using publicly available data. 1