A learning-based approach for biomedical word sense disambiguation

In the biomedical domain, word sense ambiguity is a widely spread problem with bioinformatics research effort devoted to it being not commensurate and allowing for more development. This paper presents and evaluates a learning-based approach for sense disambiguation within the biomedical domain. The main limitation with supervised methods is the need for a corpus of manually disambiguated instances of the ambiguous words. However, the advances in automatic text annotation and tagging techniques with the help of the plethora of knowledge sources like ontologies and text literature in the biomedical domain will help lessen this limitation. The proposed method utilizes the interaction model (mutual information) between the context words and the senses of the target word to induce reliable learning models for sense disambiguation. The method has been evaluated with the benchmark dataset NLM-WSD with various settings and in biomedical entity species disambiguation. The evaluation results showed that the approach is very competitive and outperforms recently reported results of other published techniques.