Word Sense Disambiguation in Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Ambiguity is a common phenomenon in text, especially in the biomedical domain. For instance, it is frequently the case that a gene, a protein encoded by the gene, and a disease associated with the protein share the same name. Resolving this problem, that is, assigning to an ambiguous word in a given context its correct meaning is called word sense disambiguation (WSD). It is a pre-requisite for associating entities in text to external identifiers and thus to put the results from text mining into a larger knowledge framework. In this chapter, we introduce the WSD problem and sketch general approaches for solving it. The authors then describe in detail the results of a study in WSD using classification. For each sense of an ambiguous term, they collected a large number of exemplary texts automatically and used them to train an SVM-based classifier. This method reaches a median success rate of 97%. The authors also provide an analysis of potential sources and methods to obtain training examples, which proved to be the most difficult part of this study.