Investigation into Human Preference between Common and Unambiguous Lexical Substitutions

We present a study that investigates that factors that determine what makes a good lexical substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus frequency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that readers might prefer common, but more ambiguous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word that determine whether it is a suitable substitution in a given context, and ask volunteers to rank their preferences between two common but ambiguous lexical substitutions, and two uncommon but also unambiguous ones. Preliminary results suggest a slight preference towards the unambiguous.