A Reservoir Computing Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation

Reservoir computing (RC) has emerged as an alternative approach for the development of fast trainable recurrent neural networks (RNNs). It is considered to be biologically plausible due to the similarity between randomly designed artificial reservoir structures and cortical structures in the brain. The paper continues our previous research on the application of a member of the family of RC approaches—the echo state network (ESN)—to the natural language processing (NLP) task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). A novel deep bi-directional ESN (DBiESN) structure is proposed, as well as a novel approach for exploiting reservoirs’ steady states. The models also make use of ESN-enhanced word embeddings. The paper demonstrates that our DBiESN approach offers a good alternative to previously tested BiESN models in the context of the word sense disambiguation task having smaller number of trainable parameters. Although our DBiESN-based model achieves similar accuracy to other popular RNN architectures, we could not outperform the state of the art. However, due to the smaller number of trainable parameters in the reservoir models, in contrast to fully trainable RNNs, it is to be expected that they would have better generalization properties as well as higher potential to increase their accuracy, which should justify further exploration of such architectures.