Senses and texts

This paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to sense-tag systematically, and on a large scale, and how we should assess progress so far. That is to say, how to attach each occurrence of a word in a text to one and only one sense in a dictionary - a particular dictionary of course, and that is part of the problem. The paper does not propose a solution to the question, though we have reported empirical findings elsewhere (Cowie et al., 1992; Wilks et al., 1996; Wilks and Stevenson, 1997), and intend to continue and refine that work. The point of this paper is to examine two well-known contributions critically: The first (Kilgarriff, 1993), which is widely taken to show that the task, as defined, cannot be carried out systematically by humans and, secondly (Yarowsky, 1995), which claims strikingly good results at doing exactly that.