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WordNet—Wikipedia—Wiktionary: Construction of a Three-way Alignment

The coverage and quality of conceptual information contained in lexical semantic resources is crucial for many tasks in natural language processing. Automatic alignment of complementary resources is one way of improving this coverage and quality; however, past attempts have always been between pairs of specific resources. In this paper we establish some set-theoretic conventions for describing concepts and their alignments, and use them to describe a method for automatically constructing n-way alignments from arbitrary pairwise alignments. We apply this technique to the production of a three-way alignment from previously published WordNet-Wikipedia and WordNet-Wiktionary alignments. We then present a quantitative and informal qualitative analysis of the aligned resource. The three-way alignment was found to have greater coverage, an enriched sense representation, and coarser sense granularity than both the original resources and their pairwise alignments, though this came at the cost of accuracy. An evaluation of the induced word sense clusters in a word sense disambiguation task showed that they were no better than random clusters of equivalent granularity. However, use of the alignments to enrich a sense inventory with additional sense glosses did significantly improve the performance of a baseline knowledge-based WSD algorithm.