Reducing Lexical Semantic Complexity with Systematic Polysemous
Classes and Underspecification

Paul Buitelaar
DFKI Language Technology Lab
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3,
66123 Saarbrcken, Germany
paulb@dfki.de

Abstract
This paper presents an algorithm for finding
systematic polysemous classes in WordNet
and similar semantic databases, based on a
definition in (Apresjan 1973). The
introduction of systematic polysemous
classes can reduce the amount of lexical
semantic processing, because the number of
disambiguation decisions can be restricted
more clearly to those cases that involve real
ambiguity (homonymy). In many
applications, for instance in document
categorization, information retrieval, and
information extraction, it may be sufficient
to know if a given word belongs to a certain
class (underspecified sense) rather than to
know which of its (related) senses exactly to
pick. The approach for finding systematic
polysemous classes is based on that of
(Buitelaar 1998a, Buitelaar 1998b), while
addressing some previous shortcomings.


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