Word sense

A word sense is a particular meaning distinguished for a word or lexical entry within an explicit analysis. The same spelling can support different interpretations, and a lexical database may represent those interpretations separately. A sense inventory is therefore a set of analytical distinctions, rather than a count of written forms.

For example, bank can refer to a financial institution or a river margin. The context in the bank approved the loan favors a different interpretation from the boat reached the bank. WordNet organizes senses through synsets and semantic relationships; its documentation explicitly distinguishes relations between meanings from associations between word forms.^[ref]

In an original annotation task, suppose two readers agree on the sense labels for three of four uses. Their observed agreement is $3/4$, but the result depends on which distinctions the inventory requires. Merging two fine distinctions can increase agreement without improving every downstream task. Word sense analysis consequently needs both context and documented granularity.