Bridging the gap between complex scientific research and the curious minds eager to explore it.

Computer Science, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Visual Word Sense Disambiguation with Context Augmentation and Visual Assistance

Visual Word Sense Disambiguation with Context Augmentation and Visual Assistance

Understanding the Complexity of Word Sense Disambiguation
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, which involves identifying the correct meaning of a word based on its context. In this article, we delve into the intricacies of WSD and explore how it can be tackled using a disambiguate-and-discriminate strategy.
Context is Key
WSD is particularly challenging when dealing with words that have multiple meanings, as the context alone may not be enough to distinguish between them. To overcome this obstacle, we leverage external knowledge bases like Wikipedia to enrich the senses by retrieving supplementary information. This approach allows us to treat WSD as a multi-step process, where the first step is disambiguation and the second is discrimination.
Disambiguation: Fitting the Sense into a Prompting Template
In the disambiguation stage, we embed the given context and all available senses of the target word in an external knowledge base. We then select the most similar sense based on cosine similarity. Once we have identified the matched sense, we create an augmented context by fitting it into a prompting template. This process enriches the context with semantic information, making it suitable for image-text matching.

Visual Assistance: Retrieving Images from Open Datasets

To further enhance the accuracy of WSD, we utilize visual assistance by using the augmented context to retrieve images from open datasets. This approach mimics the way humans learn to recognize rare objects or sophisticated concepts. By combining both the textual and visual information, our model can better distinguish between subtle differences in meaning.
Discrimination: A Pre-trained Language Model for Image Retrieval
In the discrimination stage, we adopt a pre-trained language model to retrieve images from open datasets. This model is trained on a large corpus of text data and has learned to recognize patterns in language usage. By leveraging this knowledge, our model can identify the most relevant images based on their semantic similarity to the given context.
Conclusion: Demystifying Complex Concepts through Everyday Language
In conclusion, WSD is an essential component of natural language processing that allows us to understand the complexities of word meanings in different contexts. By leveraging external knowledge bases and utilizing visual assistance, we can overcome the challenges of disambiguation and discrimination. Through everyday language and engaging analogies, we hope to demystify these complex concepts and make them more accessible to a wider audience.