Regular polysemy has received a lot of attention from the theory of lexical semantics and from computational linguistics. However, there is no consensus on how to represent the sense of underspecified examples at the token level, namely when annotating or disambiguating senses of metonymic words like “London” (Location/Organization) or “cup” (Container/Content). The goal of this dissertation is to assess whether metonymic sense underspecification justifies incorporating a third sense into our sense inventories, thereby treating the underspecified sense as independent from the literal and metonymic. We have conducted an analysis in English, Danish and Spanish. Later on, we have tried to replicate the human judgments by means of unsupervised and semi-supervised sense prediction. The automatic sense-prediction systems have been unable to find empiric evidence for the underspecified sense, even though the semi-supervised system recognizes the literal and metonymic senses with good performance.
In this light, we propose an alternative representation for the sense alternation of dot-type words where literal and metonymic are poles in a continuum, instead of discrete categories.