Neural architectures are the current state of the art in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). However, they make limited use of the vast amount of relational information encoded in Lexical Knowledge Bases (LKB). We present Enhanced WSD Integrating Synset Embeddings and Relations (EWISER), a neural supervised architecture that is able to tap into this wealth of knowledge by embedding information from the LKB graph within the neural architecture, and to exploit pretrained synset embeddings, enabling the network to predict synsets that are not in the training set. As a result, we set a new state of the art on almost all the evaluation settings considered, also breaking through, for the first time, the 80% ceiling on the concatenation of all the standard all-words English WSD evaluation benchmarks. On multilingual all-words WSD, we report state-of-the-art results by training on nothing but English.

Thanks to the wealth of high-quality annotated images available in popular repositories such as ImageNet, multimodal language-vision research is in full bloom. However, events, feelings and many other kinds of concepts which can be visually grounded are not well represented in current datasets. Nevertheless, we would expect a wide-coverage language understanding system to be able to classify images depicting recess and remorse, not just cats, dogs and bridges. We fill this gap by presenting BabelPic, a hand-labeled dataset built by cleaning the image-synset association found within the BabelNet Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB). BabelPic explicitly targets non-concrete concepts, thus providing refreshing new data for the community. We also show that pre-trained language-vision systems can be used to further expand the resource by exploiting natural language knowledge available in the LKB. BabelPic is available for download at http://babelpic.org.

Exploiting syntagmatic information is an encouraging research focus to be pursued in an effort to close the gap between knowledge-based and supervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) performance. We follow this direction in our next-generation knowledge-based WSD system, SyntagRank, which we make available via a Web interface and a RESTful API. SyntagRank leverages the disambiguated pairs of co-occurring words included in SyntagNet, a lexical-semantic combination resource, to perform state-of-the-art knowledge-based WSD in a multilingual setting. Our service provides both a user-friendly interface, available at http://syntagnet.org/, and a RESTful endpoint to query the system programmatically (accessible at http://api.syntagnet.org/).

Word senses are typically defined with textual definitions for human consumption and, in computational lexicons, put in context via lexical-semantic relations such as synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, etc. In this paper we embrace a radically different paradigm that provides a slot-filler structure, called “semagram”, to define the meaning of words in terms of their prototypical semantic information. We propose a semagram-based knowledge model composed of 26 semantic relationships which integrates features from a range of different sources, such as computational lexicons and property norms. We describe an annotation exercise regarding 50 concepts over 10 different categories and put forward different automated approaches for extending the semagram base to thousands of concepts. We finally evaluated the impact of the proposed resource on a semantic similarity task, showing significant improvements over state-of-the-art word embeddings.

The knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem dramatically hampers the creation of sense-annotated data for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Sense-annotated data are scarce for English and almost absent for other languages. This limits the range of action of deep-learning approaches, which today are at the base of any NLP task and are hungry for data. We mitigate this issue and encourage further research in multilingual WSD by releasing to the NLP community five large datasets annotated with word-senses in five different languages, namely, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and 5 distinct datasets in English, each for a different semantic domain. We show that supervised WSD models trained on our data attain higher performance than when trained on other automatically-created corpora. We release all our data containing more than 15 million annotated instances in 5 different languages at http://trainomatic.org/onesec.