Competing Views of Word Meaning: Word Embeddings and Word Senses

At least since the invention of writing, people have been troubled by the problem of what a word means. Dictionaries have traditionally been written with numbered word senses, giving the impression that the different senses of a word are fixed abstract entities, which can be used to separate usages into neat piles according to their different meanings. Adam Kilgarriff’s daring 1997 article ‘I Don’t Believe in Word Senses’ challenged this traditional view of word meaning, presenting an account in which ‘the basic units are occurrences of the word in context’. Kilgarriff went on to develop the Sketch Engine, a statistical tool that enables lexicographers and NLP researchers, teachers, and students to explore the relationship between meanings and collocations (words and their contexts). In this review article, we compare the information provided by Kilgarriff’s Word Sketches with the recently developed Word Embedding techniques and with the results of Corpus Pattern Analysis.