Coping with WORDNET Sense Proliferation

WORDNET makes a great number of fine-grained word sense distinctions. However, what could be seen as an advantage has often been considered a problem from a computational point of view. A great number of sense distinctions makes harder the problem of word sense disambiguation. One way to face this issue is reducing the number of senses, for example by grouping them into equivalence classes which abstract on some aspects of the meanings of words. In this paper we will try a different approach. Although we recognize that some sense distinctions in WORDNET are dubious, we prefer to keep the semantic richness of WORDNET and to make some proposals to extend it in order to make the task of word sense disambiguation easier.