Is Word Sense Disambiguation just one more NLP task?

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the relationship between POS tagging and WSD, arguing they are fundamentally different tasks and advocating for the reintegration of related sub-tasks in evaluation methods.

Contribution

It challenges the common view that WSD is just a finer-grained POS task and calls for a unified approach to evaluating related NLP sub-tasks.

Findings

POS and WSD are fundamentally different tasks.

There is no sense of novelty in POS that corresponds to WSD.

Reintegrating sub-tasks can improve evaluation and understanding.

Abstract

This paper compares the tasks of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and word-sense-tagging or disambiguation (WSD), and argues that the tasks are not related by fineness of grain or anything like that, but are quite different kinds of task, particularly becuase there is nothing in POS corresponding to sense novelty. The paper also argues for the reintegration of sub-tasks that are being separated for evaluation