In this paper we show that an unsupervised method for ranking word senses automatically can be used to identify infrequently occurring senses. We demonstrate this using a ranking of noun senses derived from the BNC and evaluating on the sense-tagged text available in both SemCor and the SENSEVAL-2 English all-words task. We show that the method does well at identifying senses that do not occur ...

Supervised word sense disambiguation requires training corpora that have been tagged with word senses, and these word senses typically come from a pre-existing sense inventory. Space limitations imposed by dictionary publishers have biased the field towards lists of discrete senses for an individual lexeme. This approach does not capture information about relatedness of individual senses. How i...

Decades of lexical ambiguity research has rigorously studied effects of relative sense frequency on sense disambiguation in biased contexts, while fundamental semantic issues such as distinction of different types of ambiguities, or influences from lexical meanings’ semantic nature (e.g., literal or metaphorical) as well as these meanings’ degrees of conventionalization, have received less atte...

All technologies have been emerged during the vision of Semantic Web are helpful for knowledge applications in various research areas. Semantic Web will consist of a distributed environment of shared and interoperable ontologies. Since building ontologies from scratch is not an easy task and is a time-consuming process, there is another perspective, which studies the approaches for developing a...

This study attempts to advance corpus-based exploration of sound iconicity, i.e. the existence of a non-arbitrary relationship between forms and meanings in language. We examine a number of phonesthemes, phonetic groupings proposed to be meaningful in the literature, with the aim of developing ways to validate their existence and their semantic content. Our first experiment is a replication of ...

Ineffability, the degree to which percepts or concepts resist linguistic coding, is a fairly unexplored nook of cognitive science. Although philosophical preoccupations with qualia or nonconceptual content certainly touch upon the area, there has been little systematic thought and hardly any empirical work in recent years on the subject. We argue that ineffability is an important domain for the...

Verb senses are often assumed to distinguish among different conceptual event categories. However, senses misrepresent the number of event categories expressed both within and across languages and event categories may be “named” by more than a word, i.e. a multi-word expression. Determining the nature and number of event categories in an event description requires an understanding of the parame...

Two new studies in the fruit fly Drosophila demonstrate unexpected molecular, and mechanistic, overlaps between the different senses. In the centre stand two long-established families of sensory proteins--rhodopsins and TRP channels.

Our previous study on disambiguating the preposition “with” (using WordNet for hypernym and meronym relations, LCS for verb and preposition lexical information, and features of head and complement) looked promising enough to warrant study for other prepositions. Through investigation of ten frequently used prepositions, this paper describes general senses of prepositions and sense-case definiti...

Abbreviations are widely used in writing, and the understanding of abbreviations is important for natural language processing applications. Abbreviations are not always defined in a document and they are highly ambiguous. A knowledge base that consists of abbreviations with their associated senses and a method to resolve the ambiguities are needed. In this paper, we studied the UMLS coverage, t...