Hindi Word Sense Disambiguation

Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai India {manish, mahesh, pb,pandey,yupu}@cse.iitb.ac.in Abstract Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is defined as the task of finding the correct sense of a word in a specific context. This is crucial for applications like Machine Translation and Information Extraction. While the work on automatic WSD for English is voluminous, to our knowledge, this is the first attempt for an Indian language at automatic WSD. We make use of the Wordnet for Hindi developed at IIT Bombay, which is a highly important lexical knowledge base for Hindi. The main idea is to compare the context of the word in a sentence with the contexts constructed from the Wordnet and chooses the winner. The output of the system is a particular synset number designating the sense of the word. The mentioned Wordnet contexts are built from the semantic relations and glosses, using the Application Programming Interface created around the lexical data. The evaluation has been done on the Hindi corpora provided by the Central Institute of Indian Languages and the results are encouraging. Currently the system disambiguates nouns. Work is on for other parts of speech too.