Disambiguating words with self-organizing maps

Today, powerful programs readily parse English text; understanding, however, is another matter. In this thesis, I take a step toward understanding by introducing CLARIFY, a program that disambiguates words. CLARIFY identifies patterns in observed word contexts, and uses these patterns to select the optimal word sense for any specific situation. CLARIFY learns successful patterns by manipulating an accelerated Self-Organizing Map to save these example contexts and then references them to perform further context based disambiguation within the language. Through this process and after training on 125 examples, CLARIFY can now decipher that shrimp in the sentence "The shrimp goes to the store. " is a small-person, not relying on a literal definition of each word as a separate element but looking at the sentence as a fluid solution of many elements, thereby making the inference crustacean absurd. CLARIFY is implemented in 1500 lines of Java.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Couturier, Martin Marcel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick H. Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66413

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/66413