Papers › Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word...

Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word Sense Inventories

27 Oct 2021EMNLP 2021 11arXiv:2110.14091archive 2025-07-28

Wenlin Yao, Xiaoman Pan, Lifeng Jin, Jianshu Chen, Dian Yu, Dong Yu

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to automatically identify the exact meaning of one word according to its context. Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data and can only select the best definition sentence from one predefined word sense inventory (e.g., WordNet). To address the data sparsity problem and generalize the model to be independent of one predefined inventory, we propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences (glosses) with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge. We then train a model to identify semantic equivalence between a target word in context and one of its glosses using these aligned inventories, which exhibits strong transfer capability to many WSD tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves predictions on both frequent and rare word senses, outperforming prior work by 1.2% on the All-Words WSD Task and 4.3% on the Low-Shot WSD Task. Evaluation on WiC Task also indicates that our method can better capture word meanings in context.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

SentenceWord Sense Disambiguation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMeq base F1 (Fewshot Test) 80.1 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMeq base F1 (Zero shot test) 70.2 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMeq base F1 (Zeroshot Dev) 71.5 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMeq base F1(FewShot Dev) 80.4 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMEq Large F1 (Fewshot Test) 82.3 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMEq Large F1 (Zero shot test) 72.2 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMEq Large F1 (Zeroshot Dev) 73.7 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation FEWS SEMEq Large F1(FewShot Dev) 81.8 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections