PhD Defense Els Lefever

Els Lefever defended her PhD with success on September 24rd, 2012. Her dissertation entitled ParaSense: Parallel Corpora for Word Sense Disambiguation was supervised by Martine De Cock (Ghent University) and Veronique Hoste. Her research presents a truly multilingual machine learning approach to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). By recasting the task as a cross-lingual classification task that directly incorporates evidence from four other languages she managed to develop a system that outperforms the classifiers that only exploit local context information. Moreover, because ParaSense extracts all its information from parallel corpora, it is a very flexible and language-independent approach that allows to bypass the knowledge acquisition bottleneck for WSD.