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<Paper uid="P05-3019">
  <Title>SenseRelate::TargetWord - A Generalized Framework for Word Sense Disambiguation</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Many words have different meanings when used in different contexts. Word Sense Disambiguation is the task of identifying the intended meaning of a given target word from the context in which it is used. (Lesk, 1986) performed disambiguation by counting the number of overlaps between the dictionary definitions (i.e., glosses) of the target word and those of the neighboring words in the context. (Banerjee and Pedersen, 2002) extended this method of disambiguation by expanding the glosses of words to include glosses of related words, according to the structure of WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). In subsequent work, (Patwardhan et al., 2003) and (Banerjee and Pedersen, 2003) proposed that measuring gloss overalps is just one way of determining semantic relatedness, and that word sense disambiguation can be performed by finding the most related sense of a target word to its surrounding context using a wide variety of measures of relatedness. SenseRelate::TargetWord is a Perl package that implements these ideas, and is able to disambiguate a target word in context by finding the sense that is most related to its neighbors according to a specified measure. A user of this package is able to make a variety of choices for text preprocessing options, context selection, relatedness measure selection and the selection of an algorithm for computing the over-all relatedness between each sense of the target word and words in the surrounding context. The user can customize each of these choices to fit the needs of her specific disambiguation task. Further, the various sub-tasks in the package are implemented in a modular fashion, allowing the user to easily replace a module with her own module if needed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The following sections describe the generalized framework for Word Sense Disambiguation, the architecture and usage of SenseRelate::TargetWord, and a description of the user interfaces (command line and GUI).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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