Introduction
The main purpose of the workshop is to discuss recent results in word sense disambiguation (WSD),
with reference to SENSEVAL-2. The second purpose is to begin planning SENSEVAL-3, the next
evaluation exercise for WSD systems.
SENSEVAL-2, held 5-6 July 2001 in conjunction with ACL-01, unveiled the results of over 90
systems submitted by 35 teams to tasks in 10 different languages. At the time, it was not possible to
do any in-depth analysis, so it was agreed to organize a follow-up workshop in 2002 after sufficient
analysis could be done.
The result is this one-day workshop dedicated to “Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Successes and
Future Directions”, with 17 regular papers accepted for presentation. This includes 4 papers to be
presented in a special session on preposition semantics.
The quality of the submissions was remarkably high. The wide range of problems addressed in these
papers is encouraging, including in-depth analyses of systems participating in SENSEVAL-2,
improvements and new approaches, comparative results, proposals for application-based evaluations
and for new tasks to be undertaken during SENSEVAL-3. The workshop culminates in a session to
start planning SENSEVAL-3. The central question is: Can we, and should we, move towards a more-
real application scenario? Panelists will present positions on the aim and scope of SENSEVAL-3.
We believe that this mixture of interesting approaches, results, and discussion will provide a better
insight into the recent successes in Word Sense Disambiguation, and will help create a roadmap for
future R&D in this field.
Phil Edmonds, Rada Mihalcea and Patrick Saint-Dizier
on behalf of the workshop organizers
