# One Homonym per Translation

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of homonyms in translation and semantics, proposing hypotheses and providing empirical evidence to distinguish homonymy from polysemy, with the aim of improving lexical sense inventories.

## Contribution

It introduces four hypotheses about homonyms' behavior in translation and semantics, and presents a new annotated resource to empirically test these hypotheses.

## Key findings

- Strong empirical support for the proposed hypotheses
- A new annotated homonym resource for testing
- Advances towards distinguishing homonymy from polysemy

## Abstract

The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses, collocations, and sense clusters. We present a new annotated homonym resource that allows us to test our hypotheses on existing WSD resources. The results of the experiments provide strong empirical evidence for the hypotheses. This study represents a step towards a computational method for distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy, and constructing a definitive inventory of coarse-grained senses.