How Web Communities Analyze Human Language: Word Senses in Wiktionary

The emergence of Web 2.0 enables new insights in many research areas. In this study, we examine how communities of Web users define word senses. Although a fundamental notion in human language analysis, it is a major challenge to define what a word sense is. The Collective Intelligence of Web communities has the potential to provide fundamental insights into our understanding of word senses. We focus on two human language resources from Computational Linguistics, namely WordNet and Wiktionary, and analyze their coverage and their word sense distribution. Then, we systematically study the nature of word sense definitions in both resources based on manually chosen representatives. We conclude our study by highlighting the potential of collaboratively defined word senses and suggest further analysis of collaborative resources, like Wiktionary.