Psycholinguistics, lexicography, and word sense disambiguation

Mainstream word sense disambiguation systems have relied mostly on supervised approaches. Complex interactions have been observed between learning algorithms and knowledge sources, but the factors underlying such phenomena are under-explored. This calls for more qualitative analysis of disambiguation results, possibly from an inter-disciplinary perspective. The current study thus preliminarily explores the relation between sense concreteness and the linguistic means for sense distinction with reference to the context availability model proposed in psycholinguistics and common practice in corpus-based lexicography. It will be shown that to a certain extent the varied usefulness of individual knowledge sources for target words, nouns in particular, may be related to the concreteness of the meanings concerned, which predicts how the sense is distinguished from other senses of the word in the first place. A better understanding of this relation is expected to inform the design of disambiguation systems which could then combine algorithms and knowledge sources in a genuine lexically sensitive way. © 2012 The PACLIC.