The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical
semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the
unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses,
collocations, and sense clusters. We present a new annotated homonym resource
that allows us to test our hypotheses on existing WSD resources. The results of
the experiments provide strong empirical evidence for the hypotheses. This
study represents a step towards a computational method for distinguishing
between homonymy and polysemy, and constructing a definitive inventory of
coarse-grained senses.Comment: 8 pages, including reference