Word sense annotation of polysemous words by multiple annotators

Rebecca J. Passonneau, Ansaf Salleb-Aoussi, Vikas Bhardwaj, Nancy Ide

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

22 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe results of a word sense annotation task using WordNet, involving half a dozen well-trained annotators on ten polysemous words for three parts of speech. One hundred sentences for each word were annotated. Annotators had the same level of training and experience, but interannotator agreement (IA) varied across words. There was some effect of part of speech, with higher agreement on nouns and adjectives, but within the words for each part of speech there was wide variation. This variation in IA does not correlate with number of senses in the inventory, or the number of senses actually selected by annotators. In fact, IA was sometimes quite high for words with many senses. We claim that the IA variation is due to the word meanings, contexts of use, and individual differences among annotators. We find some correlation of IA with sense confusability as measured by a sense confusion threshhold (CT). Data mining for association rules on a flattened data representation indicating each annotator's sense choices identifies outliers for some words, and systematic differences among pairs of annotators on others.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
EditorsDaniel Tapias, Irene Russo, Olivier Hamon, Stelios Piperidis, Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Bente Maegaard, Jan Odijk, Mike Rosner
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages3244-3249
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)2951740867, 9782951740860
StatePublished - 2010
Event7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010 - Valletta, Malta
Duration: May 17 2010May 23 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010

Other

Other7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
Country/TerritoryMalta
CityValletta
Period5/17/105/23/10

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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