Combining Contextual and Structural Information for Supersense Tagging of Chinese Unknown Words

Supersense tagging classifies unknown words into semantic categories defined by lexicographers and inserts them into a thesaurus. Previous studies on supersense tagging show that context-based methods perform well for English unknown words while structure-based methods perform well for Chinese unknown words. The challenge before us is how to successfully combine contextual and structural information together for supersense tagging of Chinese unknown words. We propose a simple yet effective approach to address the challenge. In this approach, contextual information is used for measuring contextual similarity between words while structural information is used to filter candidate synonyms and adjusting contextual similarity score. Experiment results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art context-based method and structure-based method.