Polysemy in Spoken Conversations and Written Texts

Aina Garí Soler, Matthieu Labeau, Chloé Clavel

Abstract
Our discourses are full of potential lexical ambiguities, due in part to the pervasive use of words having multiple senses. Sometimes, one word may even be used in more than one sense throughout a text. But, to what extent is this true for different kinds of texts? Does the use of polysemous words change when a discourse involves two people, or when speakers have time to plan what to say? We investigate these questions by comparing the polysemy level of texts of different nature, with a focus on spontaneous spoken dialogs; unlike previous work which examines solely scripted, written, monolog-like data. We compare multiple metrics that presuppose different conceptualizations of text polysemy, i.e., they consider the observed or the potential number of senses of words, or their sense distribution in a discourse. We show that the polysemy level of texts varies greatly depending on the kind of text considered, with dialog and spoken discourses having generally a higher polysemy level than written monologs. Additionally, our results emphasize the need for relaxing the popular “one sense per discourse” hypothesis.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.179
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1680–1690
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.179
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aina Garí Soler, Matthieu Labeau, and Chloé Clavel. 2022. Polysemy in Spoken Conversations and Written Texts. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1680–1690, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Polysemy in Spoken Conversations and Written Texts (Garí Soler et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.lrec-1.179.pdf
Code
 ainagari/spoken_poly
Data
IEMOCAP, Senseval-2
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