Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to determine the correct meaning of a word in context from a predefined inventory, and remains a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding. Existing methods rely heavily on manually annotated data, which limits coverage and generalization. In this work, we propose a scalable framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as knowledge distillers to construct silver-standard WSD corpora. We explore generation-based distillation, where diverse examples are synthesized for dictionary senses, and annotation-based distillation, where LLMs assign sense labels to polysemous words within real-world corpus sentences. The resulting data is used to train tiny models. Extensive experiments show that models distilled from LLM-generated data outperform those trained on gold-standard corpora, especially on general-domain benchmarks. Our annotation-based model, after balancing sense distribution, achieves 50% F1 gain on the most challenging test set and the best distilled model can match or even exceed the performance of its LLM teacher, despite having over 1000 times fewer parameters. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based distillation for building accurate, generalizable, and efficient WSD systems.

Aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) aims to predict sentiment polarities of sentences with respect to given aspect categories. To detect the sentiment toward a particular aspect category in a sentence, most previous methods first generate an aspect category-specific sentence representation for the aspect category, then predict the sentiment polarity based on the representation. These methods ignore the fact that the sentiment of an aspect category mentioned in a sentence is an aggregation of the sentiments of the words indicating the aspect category in the sentence, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning Network for Aspect-Category sentiment analysis (AC-MIMLLN), which treats sentences as bags, words as instances, and the words indicating an aspect category as the key instances of the aspect category. Given a sentence and the aspect categories mentioned in the sentence, AC-MIMLLN first predicts the sentiments of the instances, then finds the key instances for the aspect categories, finally obtains the sentiments of the sentence toward the aspect categories by aggregating the key instance sentiments. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AC-MIMLLN.