Automatic Sense Tagging Using Parallel Corpora

This article reports the results of an analysis of translation equivalents in six languages from different language families, extracted from an on-line parallel corpus of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The goal is to determine sense distinctions that can be used to automatically sense-tag the data. Our results show that sense distinctions derived from crosslingual information correspond to those made by human annotators, especially at the coarse-grained level. We also show that the reliability of sense assignments at finer-grained levels is comparable for human annotators and those produced automatically with cross-lingual data.