Multilingual Versus Monolingual WSD

Although it is generally agreed that Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an application dependent task, the great majority of the efforts has aimed at the development of WSD systems without considering their application. We argue that this strategy is not appropriate, since some aspects, such as the sense repository and the disambiguation process itself, vary according to the application. Taking Machine Translation (MT) as application and focusing on the sense repository, we present evidence for this argument by examining WSD in English-Portuguese MT of eight sample verbs. By showing that the traditional monolingual WSD strategies are not suitable for multilingual applications, we intend to motivate the development of WSD methods for particular applications.