Investigation into human preference between common and unambiguous lexical substitutions

Authors:
Andrew Walker;Advaith Siddharthan;Andrew Starkey
Affiliations:
University of Aberdeen;University of Aberdeen;University of Aberdeen
Venue:
ENLG '11 Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation
Year:
2011

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Abstract

We present a study that investigates that factors that determine what makes a good lexical substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus frequency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that readers might prefer common, but more ambiguous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word that determine whether it is a suitable substitution in a given context, and ask volunteers to rank their preferences between two common but ambiguous lexical substitutions, and two uncommon but also unambiguous ones. Preliminary results suggest a slight preference towards the unambiguous.