Toward an Integrative Approach for Making Sense Distinctions

Abstract

Word senses are the fundamental unit of description in lexicography, yet it is rarely the case that different dictionaries reach any agreement on the number and definition of senses in a language. With the recent rise in natural language processing and other computational approaches there is an increasing demand for quantitatively validated sense catalogues of words, yet no consensus methodology exists. In this paper, we look at four main approaches to making sense distinctions: formal, cognitive, distributional, and intercultural and examine the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We then consider how these may be combined into a single sound methodology. We illustrate this by examining two English words, “wing” and “fish,” using existing resources for each of these four approaches and illustrate the weaknesses of each. We then look at the impact of such an integrated method and provide some future perspectives on the research that is necessary to reach a principled method for making sense distinctions.

Lexical Semantics with Large Language Models: A Case Study of English “break”

“…In this paper, we argue that LLMs are powerful devices for studying lexical semantics in ways that can deeply inform linguistic theory. We illustrate this with a detailed case study of the lexical semantics of the English verb break, building on a richly annotated dataset from Petersen (2020) and drawing on methods from prior work in this area (Camacho-Collados and Pilehvar, 2018;Tenney et al, 2019;Garí Soler et al, 2019;Reif et al, 2019;Wiedemann et al, 2019;Branco et al, 2020;Nair et al, 2020;Li and Joanisse, 2021;Loureiro et al, 2021;Trott and Bergen, 2021;Apidianaki, 2022;McCrae et al, 2022). Break has long been central to theoretical work in lexical semantics because it has a staggering range of senses that appear to be systematically related to its argument structure.…”