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Word Sense Disambiguation: A Unified Evaluation Framework and Empirical Comparison
Aless Raganato, ro, Jose Camacho-Collados, Roberto Navigli
Word Sense Disambiguation is a long-standing task in Natural Language Processing, lying at the core of human language understanding. However, the evaluation of automatic systems has been problematic, mainly due to the lack of a reliable evaluation framework. In this paper we develop a unified evaluation framework and analyze the performance of various Word Sense Disambiguation systems in a fair setup. The results show that supervised systems clearly outperform knowledge-based models. Among the supervised systems, a linear classifier trained on conventional local features still proves to be a hard baseline to beat. Nonetheless, recent approaches exploiting neural networks on unlabeled corpora achieve promising results, surpassing this hard baseline in most test sets.
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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | All | 65.2 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | SemEval 2007 | 55.2 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | SemEval 2013 | 63.0 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | SemEval 2015 | 67.8 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | Senseval 2 | 66.8 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Word Sense Disambiguation | Knowledge-based: | WN 1st sense baseline | Senseval 3 | 66.2 | #4 of 6 | 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.
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