Constructing Word-Sense Association Networks from Bilingual Dictionary and Comparable Corpora.

A novel thesaurus named a “word-sense association network” is proposed for the first time. It consists of nodes representing word senses, each of which is defined as a set consisting of a word and its translation equivalents, and edges connecting topically associated word senses. This word-sense association network is produced from a bilingual dictionary and comparable corpora by means of a newly developed fully automatic method. The feasibility and effectiveness of the method were demonstrated experimentally by using the EDR English-Japanese dictionary together with Wall Street Journal and Nihon Keizai Shimbun corpora. The word-sense association networks were applied to word-sense disambiguation as well as to a query interface for information retrieval.