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• Unsupervised word sense disambiguation technique for diverse NLP tasks. • Word embeddings combining sense disambiguation, improving its vector representation. • Synset embedding models can help to leverage the disambiguation of polysemous words. • Multi-sense embedding models provide better representation than single-sense ones. • Recurrent synset-embedding models can improve the quality of word representations. Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA) , that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formulaic expressions, such as ' in this paper we propose ', are helpful for authors of scholarly papers because they convey communicative functions; in the above, it is ' showing the aim of this paper '. Thus, resources of formulaic expressions, such as a dictionary, that could be looked up easily would be useful. However, forms of formulaic expressions can often vary to a great extent. For example, ' in this paper we propose ', ' in this study we propose ' and ' in this paper we propose a new method to ' are all regarded as formulaic expressions. Such a diversity of spans and forms causes problems in both extraction and evaluation of formulaic expressions. In this paper, we propose a new approach that is robust to variation of spans and forms of formulaic expressions. Our approach regards a sentence as consisting of a formulaic part and non-formulaic part. Then, instead of trying to extract formulaic expressions from a whole corpus, by extracting them from each sentence, different forms can be dealt with at once. Based on this formulation, to avoid the diversity problem, we propose evaluating extraction methods by how much they convey specific communicative functions rather than by comparing extracted expressions to an existing lexicon. We also propose a new extraction method that utilises named entities and dependency structures to remove the non-formulaic part from a sentence. Experimental results show that the proposed extraction method achieved the best performance compared to other existing methods. • Formulaic expression extraction using named entities and dependency structure. • Sentence retrieval task as an extrinsic evaluation for formulaic expressions. • Changing weights on word embeddings captures characteristics of extraction methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]