This paper presents our approaches to SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation task. The first approach attempted to reformulate the task as a question answering problem, while the second one framed it as a b
inary classification problem. Our best system, which is an ensemble of XLM-R based binary classifiers trained with data augmentation, is among the 3 best-performing systems for Russian, French and Arabic in the multilingual subtask. In the post-evaluation period, we experimented with batch normalization, subword pooling and target word occurrence aggregation methods, resulting in further performance improvements.
Identifying whether a word carries the same meaning or different meaning in two contexts is an important research area in natural language processing which plays a significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisati
on, information retrieval and information extraction. Most of the previous work in this area rely on language-specific resources making it difficult to generalise across languages. Considering this limitation, our approach to SemEval-2021 Task 2 is based only on pretrained transformer models and does not use any language-specific processing and resources. Despite that, our best model achieves 0.90 accuracy for English-English subtask which is very compatible compared to the best result of the subtask; 0.93 accuracy. Our approach also achieves satisfactory results in other monolingual and cross-lingual language pairs as well.
