Towards Word Sense Disambiguation for Latvian

The goal of this paper is to describe the current situation on word sense disambigua-tion for Latvian, reviewing the available data and potential problems, and describing the explo-ration of word sense disambiguation methods using BERT contextual embeddings in order to apply them to Latvian language. Training is performed on a recently developed dataset of sense example sentences. The experiments of this paper demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by applying a mixture-of-experts approach of word sense disambiguation to the data, developing the first proof of concept WSD system for Latvian using state of art approaches. An evaluation of the WSD solution was performed on a selection of 18 highly ambiguous words, demonstrating reasonable performance.