SANDWiCH: Semantical Analysis of Neighbours for Disambiguating Words in Context ad Hoc

Daniel Guzman Olivares, Lara Quijano, Federico Liberatore


Abstract
The rise of generative chat-based Large Language Models (LLMs) over the past two years has spurred a race to develop systems that promise near-human conversational and reasoning experiences. However, recent studies indicate that the language understanding offered by these models remains limited and far from human-like performance, particularly in grasping the contextual meanings of words—an essential aspect of reasoning. In this paper, we present a simple yet computationally efficient framework for multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Our approach reframes the WSD task as a cluster discrimination analysis over a semantic network refined from BabelNet using group algebra. We validate our methodology across multiple WSD benchmarks, achieving a new state of the art for all languages and tasks, as well as in individual assessments by part of speech. Notably, our model significantly surpasses the performance of current alternatives, even in low-resource languages, while reducing the parameter count by 72%.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.358
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7019–7033
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.358/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Guzman Olivares, Lara Quijano, and Federico Liberatore. 2025. SANDWiCH: Semantical Analysis of Neighbours for Disambiguating Words in Context ad Hoc. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7019–7033, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SANDWiCH: Semantical Analysis of Neighbours for Disambiguating Words in Context ad Hoc (Guzman Olivares et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.358.pdf