Papers › WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations

WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations

28 Aug 2018NAACL 2019 6arXiv:1808.09121archive 2025-07-28

Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Jose Camacho-Collados

By design, word embeddings are unable to model the dynamic nature of words' semantics, i.e., the property of words to correspond to potentially different meanings. To address this limitation, dozens of specialized meaning representation techniques such as sense or contextualized embeddings have been proposed. However, despite the popularity of research on this topic, very few evaluation benchmarks exist that specifically focus on the dynamic semantics of words. In this paper we show that existing models have surpassed the performance ceiling of the standard evaluation dataset for the purpose, i.e., Stanford Contextual Word Similarity, and highlight its shortcomings. To address the lack of a suitable benchmark, we put forward a large-scale Word in Context dataset, called WiC, based on annotations curated by experts, for generic evaluation of context-sensitive representations. WiC is released in https://pilehvar.github.io/wic/.

PaperPDFConference PDF

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

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

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

Tasks

Word EmbeddingsWord Sense DisambiguationWord Similarity

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

WiC

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context BERT-large 340M Accuracy 65.5 #14 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context Context2vec Accuracy 59.3 #17 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context DeConf Accuracy 58.7 #18 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context SW2V Accuracy 58.1 #19 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context ElMo Accuracy 57.7 #20 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Word Sense Disambiguation Words in Context Sentence LSTM Accuracy 53.1 #24 of 37 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