Word sense disambiguation based on stretchable matching of the semantic template

It is evident that the traditional hard matching of a fixed-length template cannot satisfy the nearly indefinite variations in natural language. This issue mainly results from three major problems of the traditional matching mode: 1) in matching with a short template, the context of natural language cannot be effectively captured; 2) in matching with a long template, serious data sparsity will lead to a low success rate of template matching (i.e., low recall); and 3) due to a lack of flexible matching ability, traditional hard matching is more prone to failure. Therefore, this paper proposed a novel method of stretchable matching of the semantic template (SMOST) to deal with the above problems. We have applied this method to word sense disambiguation in the natural language processing field. In the same case of using only the SemCor corpus, the result of our system is very close to the best result of existing systems, which shows the effectiveness of new proposed method.