Explaining Unintelligible Words by Means of their Context

Explaining unintelligible words is a practical problem for text obtained by optical character recognition, from the Web (e.g., because of misspellings), etc. Approaches to wikification, to enriching text by linking words to Wikipedia articles, could help solve this problem. However, existing methods for wikification assume that the text is correct, so they are not capable of wikifying erroneous text. Because of errors, the problem of disambiguation (identifying the appropriate article to link to) becomes large-scale: as the word to be disambiguated is unknown, the article to link to has to be selected from among hundreds, maybe thousands of candidate articles. Existing approaches for the case where the word is known build upon the distributional hypothesis: words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. The increased number of candidate articles makes the difficulty of spuriously similar contexts (when two contexts are similar but belong to different articles) more severe. We propose a method to overcome this difficulty by combining the distributional hypothesis with structured sparsity, a rapidly expanding area of research. Empirically, our approach based on structured sparsity compares favorably to various traditional classification methods.