Word Sense Disambiguation in Native Spanish: A Comprehensive Lexical Evaluation Resource

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new comprehensive lexical resource for Spanish Word Sense Disambiguation, addressing limitations of existing resources and providing a sense inventory and dataset from the authoritative Spanish dictionary.

Contribution

It presents a novel Spanish WSD resource based on the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, including a sense inventory and dataset, and evaluates current resources with a state-of-the-art system.

Findings

New Spanish sense inventory and lexical dataset introduced

Evaluation metrics for existing Spanish resources reported

Resource improves accuracy of Spanish WSD systems

Abstract

Human language, while aimed at conveying meaning, inherently carries ambiguity. It poses challenges for speech and language processing, but also serves crucial communicative functions. Efficiently solve ambiguity is both a desired and a necessary characteristic. The lexical meaning of a word in context can be determined automatically by Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) algorithms that rely on external knowledge often limited and biased toward English. When adapting content to other languages, automated translations are frequently inaccurate and a high degree of expert human validation is necessary to ensure both accuracy and understanding. The current study addresses previous limitations by introducing a new resource for Spanish WSD. It includes a sense inventory and a lexical dataset sourced from the Diccionario de la Lengua Espa\~nola which is maintained by the Real Academia Espa\~nola. We also review current resources for Spanish and report metrics on them by a state-of-the-art system.