Integrating Symbolic Natural Language Understanding and Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Kexin, Forbus, Ken
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Kexin
Forbus, Ken
author_facet Zhao, Kexin
Forbus, Ken
contents Word sense disambiguation is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding. Current methods are primarily aimed at coarse-grained representations (e.g. WordNet synsets or FrameNet frames) and require hand-annotated training data to construct. This makes it difficult to automatically disambiguate richer representations (e.g. built on OpenCyc) that are needed for sophisticated inference. We propose a method that uses statistical language models as oracles for disambiguation that does not require any hand-annotation of training data. Instead, the multiple candidate meanings generated by a symbolic NLU system are converted into distinguishable natural language alternatives, which are used to query an LLM to select appropriate interpretations given the linguistic context. The selected meanings are propagated back to the symbolic NLU system. We evaluate our method against human-annotated gold answers to demonstrate its effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_16577
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Integrating Symbolic Natural Language Understanding and Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation
Zhao, Kexin
Forbus, Ken
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Word sense disambiguation is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding. Current methods are primarily aimed at coarse-grained representations (e.g. WordNet synsets or FrameNet frames) and require hand-annotated training data to construct. This makes it difficult to automatically disambiguate richer representations (e.g. built on OpenCyc) that are needed for sophisticated inference. We propose a method that uses statistical language models as oracles for disambiguation that does not require any hand-annotation of training data. Instead, the multiple candidate meanings generated by a symbolic NLU system are converted into distinguishable natural language alternatives, which are used to query an LLM to select appropriate interpretations given the linguistic context. The selected meanings are propagated back to the symbolic NLU system. We evaluate our method against human-annotated gold answers to demonstrate its effectiveness.
title Integrating Symbolic Natural Language Understanding and Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16577