A statistical analysis of polysemy in sixteen English and French dictionaries has revealed that, in each dictionary, the number of senses per word has a near-exponential distribution. A probabilistic model of historical semantics is presented which explains this distribution. This mathematical model also provides a means of estimating the average number of distinct concepts per word, which was ...

is more stringent, however, as it takes other concepts apart from A.C into account. All candidates, whether literal or not, are processed in parallel. The interpretation, which fits best with the discourse, is selected by preferential choice (cf. Table 1), a criterion not spelled out by Recanati. The overwhelming majority of approaches to metonymy processing follow some variant of the In Fass' ...

In this paper we present a semantic architecture that was employed for processing two different SemEval 2007 tasks: Task 4 (Classification of Semantic Relations between Nominals) and Task 8 (Metonymy Resolution). The architecture uses multiple forms of syntactic, lexical, and semantic information to inform a classification-based approach that generates a different model for each machine learnin...