Polysemous Words Definition in the Dictionary and Word Sense Annotation

Abstract

By employing Modern Chinese Dictionary as the semantic system for word sense tagging, this paper analyzes the relationships between polysemous words meanings in dictionary and their senses in real corpus. The paper finds that there are three types of relations. First, word meanings in the dictionary can cover all the word senses in the corpus, with some overlapping and repetitive content of each other. Second, word meanings fail to explain word senses in corpus with a lack of meanings or narrow meanings. Third, word meanings exceed the word senses in corpus. The phenomena of overlapping, narrow scope, absence and redundancy of word meanings in dictionary bring difficulties to the work of word sense tagging on real corpus. With an overall consideration of the dictionary and real corpus, reasons behind the phenomena are found out and attempts and methods have been proposed in hope of compiling better dictionaries and completing a better work of word sense annotation on corpus.