Investigation into Human Preference between Common and Unambiguous Lexical Substitutions
Andrew Walker, Advaith Siddharthan, Andrew J. Starkey · Open Research Online (The Open University) · 2011
We present a study that investigates that fac-tors that determine what makes a good lexi-cal substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus fre-quency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that read-ers might prefer common, but more ambigu-ous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word that determine whether it is a suit-able substitution in a given context, and ask volunteers to rank their preferences between two common but ambiguous lexical substitu-tions, and two uncommon but also unambigu-ous ones. Preliminary results suggest a slight preference towards the unambiguous. 1