Knowledge-based Sense Disambiguation of Multiword Expressions in Requirements Documents

Understanding the meaning and the senses of expressions is essential to analyze natural language requirements. Disambiguation of expressions in their context is needed to prevent misinterpretations. Current knowledge-based disambiguation approaches only focus on senses of single words and miss out on linking the shared meaning of expressions consisting of multiple words. As these expressions are common in requirements, we propose a sense disambiguation approach that is able to detect and disambiguate multiword expressions. We use a two-tiered approach to be able to use different techniques for detection and disambiguation. Initially, a conditional random field detects multiword expressions. Afterwards, the approach disambiguates these expressions and retrieves the corresponding senses using a knowledge-based approach. The knowledge-based approach has the benefit that only the knowledge base has to be exchanged to adapt the approach to new domains and knowledge. Our approach is able to detect multiword expressions with an $\text{F}_{1}$-score of 88.4% in an evaluation on 997 requirement sentences. The sense disambiguation achieves up to 57% $\text{F}_{1}$-score.