WordNet offers rich supersense hierarchies for nouns and verbs, yet adverbs remain underdeveloped, lacking a systematic semantic classification. We introduce a linguistically grounded supersense typology for adverbs, empirically validated through annotation, that captures major semantic domains including manner, temporal, frequency, degree, domain, speaker-oriented, and subject-oriented functions. Results from a pilot annotation study demonstrate that these categories provide broad coverage of adverbs in natural text and can be reliably assigned by human annotators. Incorporating this typology extends WordNet’s coverage, aligns it more closely with linguistic theory, and facilitates downstream NLP applications such as word sense disambiguation, event extraction, sentiment analysis, and discourse modeling. We present the proposed supersense categories, annotation outcomes, and directions for future work.

Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it essential to characterize them accurately. The recent development of LLMs has notably advanced natural language understanding, particularly in sense inference and reasoning. In this paper, we investigate the potential of LLMs in characterizing three types of semantic change: dimension, relation, and orientation. We achieve this by combining LLMs’ Chain-of-Thought with rhetorical devices and conducting an experimental assessment of our approach using newly created datasets. Our results highlight the effectiveness of LLMs in capturing and analyzing semantic changes, providing valuable insights to improve computational linguistic applications.

Polysemy enables a single word to convey multiple related meanings, reflecting the conceptual and emotional aspects of the evolution of the senses. We introduce the first sense-level benchmark, SenseRel, for modeling semantic relations between word senses, uniting denotational and connotational aspects of meaning. SenseRel distinguishes denotational relations, such as generalization or metaphor, as well as two connotational dimensions: valence and arousal. We evaluate large language models (LLMs), GPT-4o, Llama 3.1, and DeepSeek, in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Results show that GPT-4o best aligns with human affective judgments, while a fine-tuned RoBERTa model excels at classifying denotational relations.