---
title: "Measuring Word Meaning in Context — paper by Erk et al. (2013)"
description: "Erk, McCarthy and Gaylord propose two rating-based annotation schemes completed by untrained… 87 references, cited by 51 papers here."
authors: ["Katrin Erk", "Diana McCarthy", "Nicholas Gaylord"]
year: 2013
venue: "Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/J13-3003/"
doi: "10.1162/coli_a_00142"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/erk-2013-measuring-word-meaning-context/"
---
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# Measuring Word Meaning in Context

**Authors:** [Katrin Erk](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/katrin-erk/), [Diana McCarthy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/diana-mccarthy/) and Nicholas Gaylord · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** [Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/) ([Computational Linguistics 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/2013/)) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J13-3003/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J13-3003.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/coli\_a\_00142](https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00142) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2096819730)

**Citations:** 71 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [51](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/erk-2013-measuring-word-meaning-context/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Classic word sense disambiguation assumes that every occurrence of a word maps to exactly one dictionary sense. Lexicographers, linguists and psychologists have questioned that assumption, and newer models (paraphrase sets, vector spaces, latent-sense distributions) express meaning in degrees. Evaluating them requires graded human data. Erk, McCarthy and Gaylord propose two rating-based annotation schemes completed by untrained native speakers:

- **WSsim:** annotators score how well each WordNet sense fits a given occurrence on an ordinal scale.
- **Usim:** annotators judge how similar two occurrences of the same lemma are.

A second, larger annotation round places both schemes alongside single-best-sense labeling and lexical substitution on identical data. Several raters judge each item, and their scores are averaged.

The ratings show good inter-annotator correlation and span the entire scale rather than collapsing to yes/no. They also correlate strongly with both the traditional sense labels and the paraphrase annotations. The work shows that graded meaning judgments are reliable, and it provides evaluation data better suited to context-sensitive meaning models. It also offers a way to audit sense inventories.

## Key points
- The second-round dataset applies four annotation types (WSsim, Usim, WSbest, lexical substitutes) to the same sentences, with eight annotators judging each item in parallel. It is publicly released.
- For comparison, conventional WordNet-based sense tagging reaches only about 67–78% inter-annotator agreement.
- In 23% to 46% of sentences, the same annotator rated more than one sense highly. Coarser sense groupings do not resolve this, and no fixed grouping accounts for the WSsim patterns.
- Usim ratings almost always obey the triangle inequality. This supports distributional models that treat usage similarity as a metric, and it can serve as a validity check for future annotations.
- WSsim and Usim were used to examine two existing coarse-grained sense groupings. The analysis flagged groups that may not match the intuitions of untrained native speakers.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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- [University of Cambridge](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-cambridge/) — University, Cambridge, United Kingdom · 155 works · 115,562 citations
- [The University of Texas at Austin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-university-of-texas-at-austin/) — University, Austin, United States · 72 works · 55,722 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Katrin Erk, Diana McCarthy and Nicholas Gaylord. 2013. Measuring Word Meaning in Context. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{erk2013measuring,
  title = {{Measuring Word Meaning in Context}},
  author = {Katrin Erk, Diana McCarthy and Nicholas Gaylord},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.1162/coli\_a\_00142},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00142}
}
```

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*Updated 24 October 2026*