Abstract
It is common practice in computational linguistics to attempt to use selectional constraints and semantic type hierarchies as primary knowledge resources to perform word sense disambiguation (cf. Jurafsky and Martin 2000).
The most widely adopted methodology is to start from a given ontology of types (e.g. Wordnet, cf.
Miller and Fellbaum 2007) and try to use its implied conceptual categories to specify the combinatorial constraints on lexical items. Semantic Typing information about selectional preferences is then used to guide the induction of senses for both nouns and verbs in texts.
Practical results have shown, however, that there are a number of problems with such an approach. For instance, as corpus-driven pattern analysis shows (cf.
Hanks et al. 2007), the paradigmatic sets of words that populate specific argument slots within the same verb sense do not map neatly onto conceptual categories, as they often include words belonging to different types. Also, the internal composition of these sets