@inproceedings{goyal-etal-2026-paradise-semeval,
    title = "Paradise at {S}em{E}val-2026 Task 5: On the Limitations of Surface-Level Features for Graded Word Sense Plausibility Prediction",
    author = "Goyal, Dhruv  and
      Gupta, Ishita  and
      Bedi, Jatin",
    editor = "Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Ghosh, Debanjan  and
      North, Kai  and
      Komachi, Mamoru",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th {I}nternational {W}orkshop on {S}emantic {E}valuation (2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.101/",
    pages = "713--719",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-414-9",
    abstract = "This paper introduces a simple approach for predicting how plausible a word sense is in short narratives where meaning is ambiguous. We use 13 hand-crafted features, including text statistics, word-level similarity computed using basic set-based comparisons, and measures of annotator disagreement. Five diverse and largely independent traditional machine learning models are combined using a weighted ensemble with minimal tuning. Despite theoretical grounding in classical disambiguation methods, our system achieves essentially random performance, with Spearman correlation ({\ensuremath{\rho}}) of {\ensuremath{-}}0.038 and accuracy within standard deviation of 0.542 on the official test set. This result demonstrates that surface-level lexical features, while interpretable, are insufficient for graded sense plausibility prediction without deep semantic representations. By selecting features inspired by classical word sense disambiguation techniques and incorporating signals derived from human disagreement, our model produces plausibility predictions that are largely interpretable. This negative result provides important baselines and insights for future work on graded word sense disambiguation."
}