Cross-lingual Word Sense Disambiguation: Documentation on Data and Evaluation

We propose a multilingual unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task for a sample of English nouns. Instead of providing manually sense-tagged examples for each sense of a polysemous noun, our sense inventory is built up on the basis of the Europarl parallel corpus. The multilingual setup involves the translations of a given English polysemous noun in five supported languages, viz. Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Organizing this task consists in: (a) the manual creation of a multilingual sense inventory for a lexical sample of English nouns and (b) the evaluation of systems on their ability to disambiguate new occurrences of the selected polysemous nouns. For the creation of the hand-tagged gold standard, all translations of a given polysemous English noun are retrieved in the five languages and clustered by meaning. There are two types of scoring: