Tovel: Distributed Graph Clustering for Word Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP). In this problem, a large corpus of documents contains mentions to well-known (non-ambiguous) words, together with mentions to ambiguous ones. The goal is to compute a clustering of the corpus, such that documents that refer to the same meaning appear in the same cluster; subsequentially, each cluster is assigned to a different semantic meaning. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for word sense disambiguation based on distributed graph clustering that is incremental in nature and can scale to big data. A novel, heuristic vertex-centric algorithm based on the metaphor of the water cycle is used to cluster the graph. Our approach is evaluated on real datasets in both centralized and decentralized environments.