Language Evolves, so should WordNet - Automatically Extending WordNet with the Senses of Out of Vocabulary Lemmas

Abstract

This thesis provides a solution which finds the optimal location to insert the sense of a word not currently found in lexical database WordNet. Currently WordNet contains common words that are already well established in the English language. However, there are many technical terms and examples of jargon that suddenly become popular, and new slang expressions and idioms that arise. WordNet will only stay viable to the degree to which it can incorporate such terminology in an automatic and reliable fashion. To solve this problem we have developed an approach which measures the relatedness of the definition of a novel sense with all of the definitions of all of senses with the same part of speech in WordNet. These measurements were done using a variety of measures, including Extended Gloss Overlaps, Gloss Vectors, and Word2Vec. After identifying the most related definition to the novel sense, we determine if this sense should be merged as a synonym or attached as a hyponym to an existing sense. Our method participated in a shared task on Semantic Taxonomy Enhancement conducted as a part of SemeEval-2016 are fared much better than a random baseline and was comparable to various other participating systems. This approach is not only effective it represents a departure from existing techniques and thereby expands the range of possible solutions to this problem.