Regular Polysemy in WordNet

The importance of describing regular polysemy in a lexicon has often been outlined, especially in the field of natural language processing (for a good overview of this issue, see (Ravin and Leacock, 2000)). Unfortunately, no existing broad-coverage semantic lexicon has been built following this relatively recent advice. And since producing a broad coverage semantic lexicon is a very time-consuming task, one has to put this idea into practice on existing lexicons. WordNet is an appropriate lexical semantic ressource for running this experiment as it is machine readable and has a wide coverage (Fellbaum, 1998). In this paper, we introduce a method to create regular polysemy patterns from WordNet data and to automatically detect their occurrences in the lexicon. WordNet is structured as a hierarchy of synsets (sets of lexical units that are synonyms), representing lexical concepts. These concepts are linked by several kinds of semantic relations (hyperonymy, meronymy, antonymy, etc.). Each synset is also described by a lexicographic definition, as illustrated below (we denote by L#i the i lexical unit of a polysemic word in WordNet) :