The present invention is directed to characterizing the sense of an occurrence of a polysemous word in a representation of a dictionary. In a preferred embodiment, the representation of the dictionary is made up of a plurality of text segments containing word occurrences having a word sense characterization and word occurrences not having a word sense characterization. The embodiment first selects a plurality of the dictionary text segments that each contain a first word. The embodiment then identifies from among the selected text segments a first and a second occurence of a second word. The identified second occurrence of the second word has a word sense characterization. The embodiment then attributes to the first occurrence of the second word sense characterization of the second occurrence of the second word.
BOOTSTRAPPING SENSE CHARACTERIZATIONS OF OCCURRENCES OF POLYSEMOUS WORDS