English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck

Abstract:In English all-words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the labels, not the models, have become the bottleneck: frontier LLMs are accurate enough that the errors surviving in the gold standard decide benchmark rankings -- in the test sets we score on and, as we show causally, in the corpus we train on. We release lexEN, a WSD evaluation benchmark built as a conservative, human-adjudicated correction layer over Maru2022's ALL_NEW benchmark (211 labels changed, 56 removed), and SenseBench, an auditable LLM WSD evaluation harness and living leaderboard (57 models, 192 runs). The task is inventory-constrained multiple choice (the model picks from the supplied WordNet senses), so the reported accuracies are a ceiling on what models achieve without that help. On lexEN-v1 the frontier LLMs converge near 95% (best, 95.6%), the top three families are statistically indistinguishable, and accuracy trades off against reasoning effort and cost across a ~2,500x price span. Relabeling SemCor with frontier models and retraining BEM, ESCHER, and ConSeC unchanged lifts them by several F1 points on test sets the relabeling never touched; we release the relabeled corpora and Glite LENS, a 298M bi-encoder trained on the repaired labels -- to our knowledge the strongest reported (83.6 Raganato ALL, 87.4 Maru ALL_NEW) -- serving at ~$0.13 per million items. On hard items, fine-grained WordNet senses are partly ill-posed even for experts (three-reviewer Fleiss kappa=0.537); coarsening raises annotator agreement and model accuracy together across four inventories, placing a top model inside the expert agreement band at coarse granularity (statistically equivalent under three of four) but significantly below it at fine. The binding constraint is now cost.

48 pages, 10 figures. Code, data, and live leaderboard: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.17554 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.17554v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17554 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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