Models of Polysemy in Two English Dictionaries

Abstract

In this paper we argue in favor of the radial semantic structure of polysemous entries from the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. We formalized four polysemy theories as algorithms linking word senses into polysemy networks, considering the semantic similarity of dictionary definitions calculated using large language models. Chaining algorithms maximized similarity within polysemy nets and adequately distinguished senses that in the two dictionaries are directly related from those more distant.