Automatically learnt word sense embeddings are developed as an attempt to refine the capabilities of coarse word embeddings. The word sense representations obtained this way are, however, sensitive to underlying corpora and parameterizations, and they might be difficult to relate to formally defined word senses. We propose to tackle this problem by devising a mechanism to establish links between word sense embeddings and lexical resources created by experts. We evaluate the applicability of these links in a task to retrieve instances of word sense unlisted in the lexicon.

We propose to improve word sense embeddings by enriching an automatic corpus-based method with lexicographic data. Information from a lexicon is introduced into the learning algorithm’s objective function through a regularizer. The incorporation of lexicographic data yields embeddings that are able to reflect expert-defined word senses, while retaining the robustness, high quality, and coverage of automatic corpus-based methods. These properties are observed in a manual inspection of the semantic clusters that different degrees of regularizer strength create in the vector space. Moreover, we evaluate the sense embeddings in two downstream applications: word sense disambiguation and semantic frame prediction, where they outperform simpler approaches. Our results show that a corpus-based model balanced with lexicographic data learns better representations and improve their performance in downstream tasks.