Exploring classical and linguistically enriched knowledge-based methods for sense disambiguation of verbs in Brazilian Portuguese news texts

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims at determining the appropriate sense of a word in a given context. This task is challenging and highly relevant for the Natural Language Processing community. However, there are few works on Portuguese word sense disambiguation and some of these are domain oriented. In this paper, we report a study on general purpose WSD methods for verbs in Brazilian Portuguese. This study is divided into three steps: (1) the sense annotation of a corpus, (2) the exploration of classical WSD methods, and (3) the incorporation of linguistic knowledge to some of these classical methods. Among the contributions, we emphasize the free availability of the sense-annotated corpus and the use of a verb-focused repository to support classical methods in a new way.