Title: Ant colony algorithm for Arabic word sense disambiguation through English lexical information

Authors: Abdelaali Bakhouche; Tlili Yamina; Didier Schwab; Andon Tchechmedjiev

Addresses: Laboratory LRI/Team SRF, Université Badji Mokhtar - Annaba, PO Box 12, 2300 Annaba, Algeria ' Laboratory LRI/Team SRF, Université Badji Mokhtar - Annaba, PO Box 12, 2300 Annaba, Algeria ' LIG (Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble), GETALP (Study Group for Machine Translation and Automated Processing of Languages and Speech), Grenoble University, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France ' LIG (Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble), GETALP (Study Group for Machine Translation and Automated Processing of Languages and Speech), Grenoble University, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France

Abstract: The ability to identify the intended meanings of words in context is a central research topic in natural language. Many solutions exist for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) in different languages, such as English or French, but research on Arabic WSD remains limited. The main bottleneck is the lack of resources. In this paper, we show that it is possible to build a WSD system for the Arabic language thanks to the Arabic WordNet and its connections to the English Princeton WordNet. Given that the Arabic WordNet does not contain definitions for synsets, we construct a dictionary that maps the Princeton WordNet definitions to the Arabic WordNet. We also create an Arabic evaluation corpus and gold standard. We then exploit this dictionary and evaluation corpus to run and evaluate an adapted ant colony algorithm on Arabic text that can use the Lesk similarity measure thanks to definition mapping. The algorithm shows a performance of approximately 80% compared to the random baseline of 78.9%.

Keywords: Arabic language processing; word sense disambiguation; Arabic WSD; ant colony optimisation; ACO; Lesk similarity measure; definition mapping; local/global algorithm; WordNet; English lexical information; natural language processing; NLP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2015.073880

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2015 Vol.10 No.3, pp.202 - 211

Received: 29 Mar 2015
Accepted: 25 Oct 2015
Published online: 27 Dec 2015 *

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