Enhancing Medical Word Sense Inventories Using Word Sense Induction: A Preliminary Study

Correctly interpreting an ambiguous word in a given context is a critical step for medical natural language processing tasks. Medical word sense disambiguation assumes that all meanings (senses) of an ambiguous word are predetermined in a sense inventory. However, the sense inventory sometimes does not cover all senses or is outdated as new concepts arise in the practice of medicine. Obtaining all word senses is therefore the prerequisite work for word sense disambiguation. A classical method for word sense induction is string expansion, a rule-based method that searches the corpus for full forms of an abbreviation or acronym. Yet, it cannot be applied to ambiguous words that are not abbreviations. In this paper, we study methods that can semi-automatically discover word senses from a large-scale medical corpus, regardless of whether the word is an abbreviation. We conducted a comparative evaluation of four unsupervised data-driven methods, including context clustering, two types of word clustering, and sparse coding in word vector space. Overall, sparse coding outperforms the other methods. This demonstrates the feasibility of using sparse coding to discover more complete word senses. By comparing the senses discovered by sparse coding with those in senses inventory, we observed new word senses. For more than half of the ambiguous words in the MSH WSD data set (sense inventory maintained by National Library of Medicine), sparse coding detected more than one new word sense. This result shows an opportunity in enhancing medical word sense inventories with unsupervised data-driven methods.