This paper analyses the 500 most frequent verbs in contemporary Chinese and investigates their synergetic properties. The results show that the rank-frequency distributions of both valency and polysemy abide by a power-law distribution and that valency and polysemy of these verbs abide by the Good distribution and the positive negative binomial distribution respectively. Statistical analysis in...

Although regular polysemy [e.g. producer for product (John read Dickens) or container for contents (John drank the bottle)] has been extensively studied, there has been little work on why certain polysemy patterns are more acceptable than others. We take an empirical approach to the question, in particular evaluating an account based on rules against a gradient account of polysemy that is based...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the polysemy problems in a Chinese to Taiwanese TTS (text-to-speech) system. Polysemy means there are words with more than one meaning or pronunciation, such as “不”(no), “上”(up), and “下”(down), and so on. The correct pronunciation of a word affects the comprehensibility (or intelligibility) and fluency of Taiwanese speech. We applied our approach to solve...

Recent studies into Web retrieval have shown that word sense disambiguation can increase retrieval effectiveness. However, it remains unclear as to the minimum disambiguation accuracy required and the granularity with which one must define word sense in order to maximize these benefits. This study answers these questions using a simulation of the effects of ambiguity on information retrieval. I...

We consider the problem of distinguishing polysemous from homonymous nouns. This distinction is often taken for granted, but is seldom operationalized in the shape of an empirical model. We present a first step towards such a model, based on WordNet augmented with ontological classes provided by CoreLex. This model provides a polysemy index for each noun which (a), accurately distinguishes betw...

We present an approach to lexical knowledge representation where different uses of the same word can be conflated into a single meta-entry which encodes regnlarities about sense/usage extensibility. This approach makes it possible to solve lexical anrbiguities by using contextual information (luring language processing to ground underspecified word entries, and can be efficiently implemented wi...

Abstract The paradox of pain refers to the idea that folk concept is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily (as described in papers by Hill Borg et al.). By taking a close look at our terms, this paper argues there no pain. air dissolves once we recognize terms are polysemous two separate but related concepts rather than one.

In this paper, we highlight the problems of polysemy in word space models of compositionality detection. Most models represent each word as a single prototype-based vector without addressing polysemy. We propose an exemplar-based model which is designed to handle polysemy. This model is tested for compositionality detection and it is found to outperform existing prototype-based models. We have ...

There are two orders of facts about polysemy: a satisfactory theory must account in a natural way for both. The first concerns differences in the semantic content of the interpretations of a word in different contexts. It is this aspect of polysemy which has been the most actively researched, with the aim of discovering regularity and predictability. Noteworthy recent proposals concerning polys...