Distributional Semantics Approach to Thai Word Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation is one of the most important open problems in natural language processing applications such as information retrieval and machine translation. Many approach strategies can be employed to resolve word ambiguity with a reasonable degree of accuracy. These strategies are: knowledgebased, corpus-based, and hybrid-based. This paper pays attention to the corpus-based strategy that employs an unsupervised learning method for disambiguation. We report our investigation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an information retrieval technique and unsupervised learning, to the task of Thai noun and verbal word sense disambiguation. The Latent Semantic Indexing has been shown to be efficient and effective for Information Retrieval. For the purposes of this research, we report experiments on two Thai polysemous words, namely หัว /hua4/ and เก็บ /kep1/ that are used as a representative of Thai nouns and verbs respectively. The results of these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and indicate the potential of applying vector-based distributional information measures to semantic disambiguation. Keywords—Distributional semantics, Latent Semantic Indexing, natural language processing, Polysemous words, unsupervised learning, Word Sense Disambiguation.