2026
Is Word Sense Disambiguation Dead in the LLM Era?
AAAI 2026technical
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has been a central challenge since the earliest proposals for Machine Translation (MT), most famously Weaver
75 accepted papers
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has been a central challenge since the earliest proposals for Machine Translation (MT), most famously Weaver
Pretrained language models are integral part of AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as Bloom and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. Despite these efforts, such models enc…
Coreference Resolution systems are typically evaluated on benchmarks containing small- to medium-scale documents.When it comes to evaluating long texts, however, existing benchmarks, such as LitBank, remain limited in length and do not adequately assess system capabilities at the book scale, i.e., w…
Vision-language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP and SigLIP, have become the de facto standard for multimodal tasks, serving as essential building blocks for recent Multimodal Large Language Models, including LLaVA and PaliGemma. However, current evaluations for VLMs remain heavily anchored to ImageNet.
Understanding the meaning of words in context is a fundamental capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite extensive evaluation efforts, the extent to which LLMs show evidence that they truly grasp word senses remains underexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by evaluating both i) t
Machine translation quality has steadily improved over the years, achieving near-perfect translations in recent benchmarks.These high-quality outputs make it difficult to distinguish between state-of-the-art models and to identify areas for future improvement.In this context, automatically identifyi
In Machine Translation (MT) evaluation, metric performance is assessed based on agreement with human judgments. In recent years, automatic metrics have demonstrated increasingly high levels of agreement with humans. To gain a clearer understanding of metric performance and establish an upper bound,…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involving selecting the correct meaning of a word based on its context. With Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) like BERT and DeBERTa now well established, significant progress has been made in understanding contextua…
Question Answering (QA) on narrative text poses a unique challenge to current systems, requiring a deep understanding of long, complex documents. However, the reliability of NarrativeQA, the most widely used benchmark in this domain, is hindered by noisy documents and flawed QA pairs. In this work,
As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve, their evaluation increasingly centers on complex, high-level tasks, often at the expense of systematically assessing fundamental capabilities. To address this gap, recent work proposed LMentry, a compact benchmark comprising tasks that are trivial
The number of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasing steadily, though the majority are designed predominantly for the English language. While state-of-the-art LLMs can handle other languages, due to language contamination or some degree of multilingual pretraining data, they are not o…
Entity Linking and Entity Disambiguation systems aim to link entity mentions to their corresponding entries, typically represented by descriptions within a predefined, static knowledge base. Current models assume that these knowledge bases are complete and up-to-date, rendering them incapable of han
One of the most widely used tasks for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA). While open-ended question answering tasks are more challenging to evaluate, MCQA tasks are, in principle, easier to assess, as the model’s answer is thought to be simple to ext…
Current coreference resolution systems are typically tailored for short- or medium-sized texts and struggle to scale to very long documents due to architectural limitations and implied memory costs.However, a few available solutions can be applied by inputting documents split into smaller windows. T
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), aiming to assign the correct meaning (sense) to a word in context. However, traditional WSD systems rely on WordNet as the underlying sense inventory, often differentiating meticulously between subtle nuances of word…
Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics assess translation quality automatically. Recently, researchers have employed MT metrics for various new use cases, such as data filtering and translation re-ranking. However, most MT metrics return assessments as scalar scores that are difficult to interp…
Named entities – typically expressed via proper nouns – play a key role in Natural Language Processing, as their identification and comprehension are crucial in tasks such as Relation Extraction, Coreference Resolution and Question Answering, among others. Tasks like these also often entail dealing…
Sequence-to-sequence models have become the de facto standard for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing due to their high-quality performance. However, these systems face efficiency challenges because of their large model size and computational time, which limit their accessibility within th…
Recent advancements in text summarization, particularly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), have shown remarkable performance. However, a notable challenge persists as a substantial number of automatically-generated summaries exhibit factual inconsistencies, such as hallucinations. In r…
Annually, at the Conference of Machine Translation (WMT), the Metrics Shared Task organizers conduct the meta-evaluation of Machine Translation (MT) metrics, ranking them according to their correlation with human judgments. Their results guide researchers toward enhancing the next generation of metr…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an important task in NLP, which serves the purpose of automatically disambiguating a polysemous word with its most likely sense in context. Recent studies have advanced the state of the art in this task, but most of the work has been carried out on contemporary Eng…
Several Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks focus on linking text to explicit knowledge, including Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling, Semantic Parsing, and Relation Extraction. In addition to the importance of connecting raw text with explicit knowledge bases, the integration…
Large autoregressive generative models have emerged as the cornerstone for achieving the highest performance across several Natural Language Processing tasks. However, the urge to attain superior results has, at times, led to the premature replacement of carefully designed task-specific approaches w…
Data scarcity is a prevalent challenge in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs). The insatiable hunger of LLMs for large corpora becomes even more pronounced when dealing with non-English and low-resource languages. The issue is particularly exacerbated in Semantic Parsing (SP), i.e. the task of c…
Despite significant advances in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), much work in this field has been carried out with a focus on verbal predicates, with the research on nominal SRL lagging behind. In many contexts, however, nominal predicates are often as informative as verbal ones, thus needing proper tr…
Entity Linking (EL) and Relation Extraction (RE) are fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing, serving as critical components in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose ReLiK, a Retriever-Reader architecture for both EL and RE, where, given an input text, the Retriever module…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of associating a word in a given context with its most suitable meaning among a set of possible candidates. While the task has recently witnessed renewed interest, with systems achieving performances above the estimated inter-annotator agreement, at the ti…
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in commonsense question answering benchmarks, but the process underlying their success remains largely opaque. As a consequence, recent approaches have equipped LLMs with mechanisms for knowledge retrieval, reasoning and i…
In this paper, we examine the current state-of-the-art in AMR parsing, which relies on ensemble strategies by merging multiple graph predictions. Our analysis reveals that the present models often violate AMR structural constraints. To address this issue, we develop a validation method, and show how…
Lexical ambiguity is a significant and pervasive challenge in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), with many state-of-the-art (SOTA) NMT systems struggling to handle polysemous words (Campolungo et al., 2022). The same holds for the NMT pretraining paradigm of denoising synthetic "code-switched" text (…
This paper introduces a novel aligner for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that can scale cross-lingually, and is thus capable of aligning units and spans in sentences of different languages. Our approach leverages modern Transformer-based parsers, which inherently encode alignment infor…
Over the last few years, Masked Language Modeling (MLM) pre-training has resulted in remarkable advancements in many Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, which sparked an interest in researching alternatives and extensions to the MLM objective. In this paper, we tackle the absence of explicit…
In recent years, research in text summarization has mainly focused on the news domain, where texts are typically short and have strong layout features. The task of full-book summarization presents additional challenges which are hard to tackle with current resources, due to their limited size and av…
Although we have witnessed impressive progress in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), most of the research in the area is carried out assuming that the majority of predicates are verbs. Conversely, predicates can also be expressed using other parts of speech, e.g., nouns and adjectives. However, non-verba…
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a Semantic Parsing formalism that aims at providing a semantic graph abstraction representing a given text. Current approaches are based on autoregressive language models such as BART or T5, fine-tuned through Teacher Forcing to obtain a linearized version of…
Relation Extraction (RE) is a task that identifies relationships between entities in a text, enabling the acquisition of relational facts and bridging the gap between natural language and structured knowledge. However, current RE models often rely on small datasets with low coverage of relation type…
In the last five years, there has been a significant focus in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on developing larger Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and introducing benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQuAD to measure their abilities in language understanding, reasoning, and reading comprehension. Th…
Lexical ambiguity poses one of the greatest challenges in the field of Machine Translation. Over the last few decades, multiple efforts have been undertaken to investigate incorrect translations caused by the polysemous nature of words. Within this body of research, some studies have posited that mo…
Local models for Entity Disambiguation (ED) have today become extremely powerful, in most part thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models. However, despite their significant performance achievements, most of these approaches frame ED through classification formulations that have intri…
A language-independent representation of meaning is one of the most coveted dreams in Natural Language Understanding. With this goal in mind, several formalisms have been proposed as frameworks for meaning representation in Semantic Parsing. And yet, the dependencies these formalisms share with resp…
Idioms are phrases which present a figurative meaning that cannot be (completely) derived by looking at the meaning of their individual components. Identifying and understanding idioms in context is a crucial goal and a key challenge in a wide range of Natural Language Understanding tasks. Although…
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying named entities in texts and classifying them through specific semantic categories, a process which is crucial for a wide range of NLP applications. Current datasets for NER focus mainly on coarse-grained entity types, tend to consider a singl…
With state-of-the-art systems having finally attained estimated human performance, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has now joined the array of Natural Language Processing tasks that have seemingly been solved, thanks to the vast amounts of knowledge encoded into Transformer-based pre-trained languag…
Thanks to the effectiveness and wide availability of modern pretrained language models (PLMs), recently proposed approaches have achieved remarkable results in dependency- and span-based, multilingual and cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling (SRL). These results have prompted researchers to investig…
Recent studies have shed some light on a common pitfall of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, stemming from their struggle to disambiguate polysemous words without lapsing into their most frequently occurring senses in the training corpus. In this paper, we first provide a novel approach for a…
In the field of sentiment analysis, several studies have highlighted that a single sentence may express multiple, sometimes contrasting, sentiments and emotions, each with its own experiencer, target and/or cause. To this end, over the past few years researchers have started to collect and annotate…
Enabling computers to comprehend the intent of human actions by processing language is one of the fundamental goals of Natural Language Understanding. An emerging task in this context is that of free-form event process typing, which aims at understanding the overall goal of a protagonist in terms…
One of the common traits of past and present approaches for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is that they rely upon discrete labels drawn from a predefined linguistic inventory to classify predicate senses and their arguments.However, we argue this need not be the case. In this paper, we present an appr…
Architectures that model language and vision together havereceived much attention in recent years. Nonetheless, most tasks in this field focus on end-to-end applications without providing insights on whether it is the underlying semantics of visual objects or words that is captured. In this paper we…
The lexical substitution task aims at finding suitable replacements for words in context. It has proved to be useful in several areas, such as word sense induction and text simplification, as well as in more practical applications such as writing-assistant tools. However, the paucity of annotated d…
Over the past few years, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has received renewed interest: recently proposed systems have shown the remarkable effectiveness of deep learning techniques in this task, especially when aided by modern pretrained language models. Unfortunately, such systems are still not av…
Supervised systems have nowadays become the standard recipe for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), with Transformer-based language models as their primary ingredient. However, while these systems have certainly attained unprecedented performances, virtually all of them operate under the constraining a…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a historical NLP task aimed at linking words in contexts to discrete sense inventories and it is usually cast as a multi-label classification task. Recently, several neural approaches have employed sense definitions to better represent word meanings. Yet, these app…
Recently, generative approaches have been used effectively to provide definitions of words in their context. However, the opposite, i.e., generating a usage example given one or more words along with their definitions, has not yet been investigated. In this work, we introduce the novel task of Exemp…
The lexical substitution task aims at generating a list of suitable replacements for a target word in context, ideally keeping the meaning of the modified text unchanged. While its usage has increased in recent years, the paucity of annotated data prevents the finetuning of neural models on the task…
Despite the recent great success of the sequence-to-sequence paradigm in Natural Language Processing, the majority of current studies in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) still frame the problem as a sequence labeling task. In this paper we go against the flow and propose GSRL (Generating Senses and RoL…
With the advent of contextualized embeddings, attention towards neural ranking approaches for Information Retrieval increased considerably. However, two aspects have remained largely neglected: i) queries usually consist of few keywords only, which increases ambiguity and makes their contextualizati…
Notwithstanding the growing interest in cross-lingual techniques for Natural Language Processing, there has been a surprisingly small number of efforts aimed at the development of easy-to-use tools for cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling. In this paper, we fill this gap and present InVeRo-XL, an of…
Neural Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has recently been shown to benefit from the incorporation of pre-existing knowledge, such as that coming from the WordNet graph. However, state-of-the-art approaches have been successful in exploiting only the local structure of the graph, with only close neigh…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), i.e., the task of assigning senses to words in context, has seen a surge of interest with the advent of neural models and a considerable increase in performance up to 80% F1 in English. However, when considering other languages, the availability of training data is l…
Entity Linking (EL) systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks mainly thanks to the contextualized representations provided by recent pretrained language models. However, such systems still require massive amounts of data – millions of labeled examples – to perform at their best…
In Text-to-AMR parsing, current state-of-the-art semantic parsers use cumbersome pipelines integrating several different modules or components, and exploit graph recategorization, i.e., a set of content-specific heuristics that are developed on the basis of the training set. However, the generalizab…
Extracting relation triplets from raw text is a crucial task in Information Extraction, enabling multiple applications such as populating or validating knowledge bases, factchecking, and other downstream tasks. However, it usually involves multiple-step pipelines that propagate errors or are limited…
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims at making explicit the semantics of a word in context by identifying the most suitable meaning from a predefined sense inventory. Recent breakthroughs in representation learning have fueled intensive WSD research, resulting in considerable performance improvement…
Graph-based semantic parsing aims to represent textual meaning through directed graphs. As one of the most promising general-purpose meaning representations, these structures and their parsing have gained a significant interest momentum during recent years, with several diverse formalisms being prop…
In this paper we present SPRING Online Services, a Web interface and RESTful APIs for our state-of-the-art AMR parsing and generation system, SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). The Web interface has been developed to be easily used by the Natural Language Processing community, as well as by…
The intelligent manipulation of symbolic knowledge has been a long-sought goal of AI. However, when it comes to Natural Language Processing (NLP), symbols have to be mapped to words and phrases, which are not only ambiguous but also language-specific: multilinguality is indeed a desirable property f…
While cross-lingual techniques are finding increasing success in a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks, their application to Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) has been strongly limited by the fact that each language adopts its own linguistic formalism, from PropBank for English to AnCora for…
Multilingual and cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) have recently garnered increasing attention as multilingual text representation techniques have become more effective and widely available. While recent work has attained growing success, results on gold multilingual benchmarks are still no…
Multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key intermediate task which is needed in many areas of NLP. In this paper, we address the well-known issue of data scarcity in NER, especially relevant when moving to a multilingual scenario, and go beyond current approaches to the creation of multili…
Transformer-based architectures brought a breeze of change to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), improving models' performances by a large margin. The fast development of new approaches has been further encouraged by a well-framed evaluation suite for English, which has allowed their performances to b…
Recent research indicates that taking advantage of complex syntactic features leads to favorable results in Semantic Role Labeling. Nonetheless, an analysis of the latest state-of-the-art multilingual systems reveals the difficulty of bridging the wide gap in performance between high-resource (e.g.,…
To date, the most successful word, word sense, and concept modelling techniques have used large corpora and knowledge resources to produce dense vector representations that capture semantic similarities in a relatively low-dimensional space. Most current approaches, however, suffer from a monolingua…
The problem of grounding language in vision is increasingly attracting scholarly efforts. As of now, however, most of the approaches have been limited to word embeddings, which are not capable of handling polysemous words. This is mainly due to the limited coverage of the available semantically-anno…
The knowledge acquisition bottleneck strongly affects the creation of multilingual sense-annotated data, hence limiting the power of supervised systems when applied to multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised approach based upon a novel label propagation sc…