Finetuning Latin BERT for Word Sense Disambiguation on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

AbstractThe Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) is a comprehensive monolingual dictionary that records contextualized meanings and usages of Latin words in antique sources at an unprecedented scale. We created a new dataset based on a subset of sense representations in the TLL, with which we finetuned the Latin-BERT neural language model (Bamman and Burns, 2020) on a supervised Word Sense Disambiguation task. We observe that the contextualized BERT representations finetuned on TLL data score better than static embeddings used in a bidirectional LSTM classifier on the same dataset, and that our per-lemma BERT models achieve higher and more robust performance than reported by Bamman and Burns (2020) based on data from a bilingual Latin dictionary. We demonstrate the differences in sense organizational principles between these two lexical resources, and report about our dataset construction and improved evaluation methodology.