Abstract

Resnik and Yarowsky (1997) made a set of observations about the state of the art in automatic word sense disambiguation and, motivated by those observations, offered several specific proposals regarding improved evaluation criteria, common training and testing resources, and the definition of sense inventories. Subsequent discussion of those proposals resulted in senseval, the first evaluation exercise for word sense disambiguation (Kilgarriff and Palmer forthcoming). This article is a revised and extended version of our 1997 workshop paper, reviewing its observations and proposals and discussing them in light of the senseval exercise. It also includes a new in-depth empirical study of translingually-based sense inventories and distance measures, using statistics collected from native-speaker annotations of 222 polysemous contexts across 12 languages. These data show that monolingual sense distinctions at most levels of granularity can be effectively captured by translations into some ...

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