Ontology-Based Word Sense Disambiguation for Scientific Literature

Scientific documents often adopt a well-defined vocabulary and avoid the use of ambiguous terms. However, as soon as documents from different research sub-communities are considered in combination, many scientific terms become ambiguous as the same term can refer to different concepts from different sub-communities. The ability to correctly identify the right sense of a given term can considerably improve the effectiveness of retrieval models, and can also support additional features such as search diversification. This is even more critical when applied to explorative search systems within the scientific domain. In this paper, we propose novel semi-supervised methods to term disambiguation leveraging the structure of a community-based ontology of scientific concepts. Our approach exploits the graph structure that connects different terms and their definitions to automatically identify the correct sense that was originally picked by the authors of a scientific publication. Experimental evidence over two different test collections from the physics and biomedical domains shows that the proposed method is effective and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches based on feature vectors constructed out of term co-occurrences as well as standard supervised approaches.