The Structure of Polysemy : A Study of Multi-sense Words Based on WordNet

The issues in polysemy with respect to the verbs in WordNet will be discussed in this paper. The hypernymy/hyponymy structure of the multiple senses is observed when we try to build a bilingual network for Chinese and English. There are several types of polysemic patterns and a co-hypernym may have the same word form as its subordinates. Fellbaum (2000) dubbed autotroponymy that the verbs linked by manner relation share the same verb form. However, her syntactic criteria seem not compatible to the hierarchies in WN. Either the criteria or the network should be reconducted. For most verbs in WN 1.7, polysemous relations are unlikely to extend over 3 levels of IS-A relation. Highly polysemous verbs are more complicated and may be involved in certain semantic structures. Semi-automatic sense grouping may be helpful for multimlinguital information retrieveal.