Tense Sense Disambiguation: A New Syntactic Polysemy Task

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy – the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of Tense Sense Disambiguation (TSD): given a concrete tense syntactic form present in a sentence, select its appropriate sense among a set of possible senses. Using English grammar textbooks, we compiled a syntactic sense dictionary comprising common tense syntactic forms and semantic senses for each. We annotated thousands of BNC sentences using the defined senses. We describe a supervised TSD algorithm trained on these annotations, which outperforms a strong baseline for the task.