Applying Deep Belief Networks to Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we applied a novel learning algorithm, namely, Deep Belief Networks (DBN) to word sense disambiguation (WSD). DBN is a probabilistic generative model composed of multiple layers of hidden units. DBN uses Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to greedily train layer by layer as a pretraining. Then, a separate fine tuning step is employed to improve the discriminative power. We compared DBN with various state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms in WSD such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Maximum Entropy model (MaxEnt), Naive Bayes classifier (NB) and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). We used all words in the given paragraph, surrounding context words and part-of-speech of surrounding words as our knowledge sources. We conducted our experiment on the SENSEVAL-2 data set. We observed that DBN outperformed all other learning algorithms.