sensefrom

Sensefrom is a term used in lexical semantics to denote a contextual cue that determines the intended sense of a polysemous word from among its possible senses. It captures the idea that sense activation is directed by contextual information rather than being uniform across all occurrences.

Origin and scope: Sensefrom has appeared in discussions of context-driven disambiguation in the late 2010s and is used mainly in theoretical work and certain computational frameworks. The term is typically written as sensefrom (sometimes SenseFrom) and is applied to describe how context guides sense selection.

Definition: In formal terms, sensefrom(W, S, C) holds if, in context C, the sense S is the activated or expected sense of word W. The context C may include discourse antecedents, syntactic role, or nearby lexical items. The concept models sense selection as a dependency on contextual factors rather than a fixed interpretation.

Illustrative example: In "She swung the bat during the game," sensefrom would favor the sports equipment sense for bat, given the game-related context. In contrast, in "The bat hung from the cave," the animal sense may be preferred due to discourse about wildlife.

Applications and relation to other concepts: Sensefrom can be used to annotate lexical resources, inform word sense disambiguation algorithms, or serve as a cue in knowledge graphs to connect a word to the appropriate sense. It relates to polysemy, contextual semantics, and salience, and it contrasts with approaches that rely solely on frequency or global priors.

Limitations: The reliability of sensefrom depends on the quality and specificity of available context and the completeness of sense inventories. It is not universally adopted and can vary across languages and corpora.

See also: Word sense disambiguation, polysemy, semantic context, lexical semantics.