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Word Sense Disambiguation: A Unified Evaluation Framework and Empirical Comparison

1 Apr 2017EACL 2017 4archive 2025-07-28

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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Word Sense Disambiguation

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Word Sense Disambiguation: a Unified Evaluation Framework and Empirical Comparison

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
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

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