Consistent Criteria for Sense Distinctions

This paper specifically addresses the question of polysemy with respect to verbs, and whether or not the sense distinctions that are made in on-line lexical resources such as WordNet are appropriate for computational lexicons. The use of sets of related syntactic frames and verb classes are examined as a means of simplifying the task of defining different senses, and the importance of concrete criteria such as different predicate argument structures, semantic class constraints and lexical co-occurrences is emphasized.