---
title: "Word Sense Disambiguation Improves Statistical Machine"
description: "Earlier studies disagreed on whether word sense disambiguation (WSD) actually helps statistical… 23 references, cited by 138 papers here."
authors: ["Yee Seng Chan", "Hwee Tou Ng", "David Chiang"]
year: 2007
venue: "Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P07-1005/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chan-2007-word-sense-disambiguation-improves-statistical/"
---
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# Word Sense Disambiguation Improves Statistical Machine Translation

**Authors:** [Yee Seng Chan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yee-seng-chan/), [Hwee Tou Ng](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/hwee-tou-ng/) and [David Chiang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-chiang/) · **Year:** 2007 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) ([ACL 2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/2007/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P07-1005/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P07-1005.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2139183784)

**Citations:** 278 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [138](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chan-2007-word-sense-disambiguation-improves-statistical/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Earlier studies disagreed on whether word sense disambiguation (WSD) actually helps statistical machine translation. Some reported losses, and others showed gains only on simplified tasks or without significance testing. The authors test the question on a real Chinese-to-English translation task by plugging a strong WSD classifier into Hiero, a hierarchical phrase-based system built on synchronous CFG.

Instead of using a fixed sense inventory, the WSD "senses" are English phrases aligned to Chinese words or two-word phrases in the parallel corpus. Training examples are harvested at the moments when Hiero extracts its rules. The classifier is an SVM that uses local collocations, POS tags and surrounding words.

Its predictions enter Hiero as two extra log-linear features attached to existing grammar rules, so no competing rules are created. These features are tuned and decoded together with all the other features.

The combined Hiero+WSD system translates measurably better, and the gain is statistically significant. This is the first clear evidence that WSD can benefit a state-of-the-art MT system.

## Key points
- The WSD classifier is an SVM (implementation of Chang and Lin, 2001) that outputs a probability for each class. It uses three groups of features:
  - local collocations (w−1 w+1, w−1, w+1);
  - POS tags (P−1, P0, P+1);
  - surrounding unigrams, kept only if they appear at least 3 times with some sense.
- On the SENSEVAL-3 Chinese lexical-sample test data, the classifier's accuracy compares favourably with the best system that took part in that task.
- Hiero is extended with two new features:
  - P_wsd(t|s), the contextual probability the classifier gives to translating source substring s as target substring t;
  - P_ty_wsd = exp(−|t|), which rewards rules that contain WSD-suggested translations.
- Training data for the WSD model is built as follows:
  - source phrases are limited to 1–2 Chinese words;
  - each example's context is its sentence plus one neighbouring sentence on each side;
  - translations seen only once are dropped;
  - a phrase is classified only if it has at least 10 examples.
- The Collins sign-test judged 374 test sentences better and 318 worse with Hiero+WSD. About 73% of WSD-proposed translations appear in the reference translations, and of the 7087 single-word proposals, 77.31% match.

## Interesting ideas
- **Translations as senses.** Phrases aligned in a parallel corpus serve as the sense labels, so no hand-built sense inventory is needed. This could transfer to Ukrainian–English work where resources like WordNet are thin.
- **Score existing rules instead of adding new ones.** The WSD output only adds feature scores to rules the system already has. External knowledge (a classifier, a gazetteer, a terminology list) can then be weighed by standard tuning instead of a manually chosen weight.
- **Pair a sparse feature with a companion indicator.** A probability feature that fires on only some rules would penalise those rules. A second, count-like feature cancels that bias, which is a reusable trick for any partial-coverage signal in log-linear models.
- **Source-side context comes almost free.** Because the input sentence is fixed, features conditioned on arbitrary source context leave decoding complexity unchanged. Rich source-side classifiers can therefore be added cheaply.
- **Look past the corpus-level score.** Using a per-sentence sign-test and inspecting the worse outputs showed that some "losses" were adequate translations that BLEU penalised for wording. This is a useful reminder to complement precision-based metrics with manual error analysis.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [National University of Singapore](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/national-university-of-singapore/) — University, Singapore, Singapore · 84 works · 32,204 citations

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🧭 Topics (2): [🔁 Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/machine-translation/) · 958 works · [🔀 Word sense disambiguation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/word-sense-disambiguation/) · 52 works

💡 Concepts (1): [🔀 Word sense disambiguation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/word-sense-disambiguation/) · 30 works

## Cite

Cite as: Yee Seng Chan, Hwee Tou Ng and David Chiang. 2007. Word Sense Disambiguation Improves Statistical Machine Translation. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{chan2007word,
  title = {{Word Sense Disambiguation Improves Statistical Machine Translation}},
  author = {Yee Seng Chan, Hwee Tou Ng and David Chiang},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2007},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P07-1005/}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 11 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. C. Cabezas and P. Resnik. 2005. Using WSD techniques for lexical selection in statistical machine translation. Technical report, University of Maryland. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=C%2E+Cabezas+and+P%2E+Resnik%2E+2005%2E+Using+WSD+techniques+for+lexical+selection+in+statistical+machine+translation%2E+Technical+report%2C+University+of+Maryland%2E)
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*Updated 24 October 2026*