An Open Database of Senses for Serbian Polysemous Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives

Abstract

The goal of this study was twofold. On the one hand, we aimed to obtain the number of senses estimations for polysemous nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as frequencies of occurrence for each sense based on native speakers’ intuitions. From that, we derived multiple quantifications to describe each word. We determined what the senses of each word are by allowing participants to list everything they recall a word could denote. We categorised the responses and counted the senses per word. On the other hand, we aimed to investigate the reliability of native speakers’ intuitions. The novelty in our approach was that multiple researchers who categorised the responses were also treated as participants in the study. In this paper, we present the database and explore the multiple-coder approach. This process generated data on various levels that could be useful for psycholinguistic research. We share both qualitative data – participants’ individual responses and classification into senses by our coders, and quantitative data – number of senses counts, sense probabilities, entropy, redundancy, familiarity, and concreteness measures. All data are freely available at https://osf.io/ukcrg/.