Senseused

Senseused is a term used in linguistic theory and natural language processing to denote the specific semantic sense of a word as it is activated in a given usage. It helps distinguish the particular interpretation chosen by a reader or model from the broader set of possible senses listed in a dictionary or lexical resource. In this framing, a word has multiple senses, and each occurrence of the word carries a senseused value corresponding to the one interpreted in that context.

In cognitive models and word sense disambiguation workflows, senseused labels are assigned to individual token instances. They are inferred from cues such as syntax, nearby words, and world knowledge, and may be generated automatically by disambiguation algorithms or annotated manually for training data. The concept emphasizes the dynamic nature of meaning as it manifests in real language use, rather than a static, one-size-fits-all sense.

Example: the sentence "I deposited money in the bank" would yield senseused = bank_financial_institution, while "I sat on the river bank" would yield bank_landform. These distinctions illustrate how senseused captures the activated meaning rather than the underlying lemma.

Limitations include the lack of a formal, universally adopted definition for senseused, and its reliance on the granularity of the senses used in a given resource. Nevertheless, the concept is useful for discussions of lexical ambiguity, sense inventories, and the evaluation of disambiguation systems.

See also: word sense disambiguation, polysemy, lexical semantics.