A Lexicon for Underspecified Semantic Tagging

The paper defends the notion that semantic tagging should be viewed as more than disambiguation between senses. Instead, semantic tagging should be a first step in the interpretation process by assigning each lexical item a representation of all of its systematically related senses, from which further semantic processing steps can derive discourse dependent interpretations. This leads to a new type of semantic lexicon (CoreLex) that supports underspecified semantic tagging through a design based on systematic polysemous classes and a class-based acquisition of lexical knowledge for specific domains. 1 Underspecified semantic tagging Semantic tagging has mostly been considered as nothing more than disambiguation to be performed along the same lines as part-of-speech tagging: given n lexical items each with m senses apply linguistic heuristics and/or statistical measures to pick the most likely sense for each lexical item (see eg: (Yarowsky, 1992) (Stevenson and Wilks, 1997)). I do ..