Extended clusters of vertical polysemy : An explorative study of eleven wordnets

The purpose of this study is to identify and examine maximum-size polysemy clusters in semantic hierarchies of eleven wordnets that are included in Open Multilingual Wordnet. The clusters are extracted from both the super-subordinate hierarchies of the noun(IS-A) and the hierarchies of the verb (MANNER-OF). We focus on the substructures of semantic hierarchies that display vertical polysemy relationships (i.e. clusters containing words with the same spelling in their vertices). Besides the maximum-size polysemy clusters, the number of vertical polysemy relationships and the PoS distribution in these relations are examined. The findings of this study suggest that large polysemy clusters may indicate potential problems like inaccurate identification of a word’s meaning in an NLP task. The algorithm detecting maximal clusters of polysemy has the potential to be applied to other wordnets than those focused on in this study. The analysis in this article is the first step in large-size polysemy clusters studies. We expect that polysemy clusters will help to evaluate the state of the wordnets’ semantic hierarchies and to assess the suitability of these structures as background knowledge for solving NLP tasks