"SENSEVAL: An Exercise in Evaluating Word Sense
                  Disambiguation Programs"

                       Adam Kilgarriff
                   University of Brighton


There are  now  many  computer  programs  for  automatically
determining which sense a word  is being used in. One  would
like to be able to say  which were better, which worse,  and
also  which  words,  or  varieties  of  language,  presented
particular problems  to which  programs. However  evaluation
presents a  range  of  problems. In  this  paper  I  briefly
discuss the problems, and  then describe a pilot  evaluation
exercise (`SENSEVAL') taking place under the auspices of ACL
SIGLEX  (the  Lexicons   Special  Interest   Group  of   the
Association  for  Computational  Linguistics)  and   EURALEX
(European Association  for Lexicography)  in the  course  of
1998.