Discovering word senses from a network of lexical cooccurrences

Lexico-semantic networks such as WordNet have been criticized about the nature of the senses they distinguish as well as on the way they define these senses. In this article, we present a possible solution to overcome these limits by defining the sense of words from the way they are used. More precisely, we propose to differentiate the senses of a word from a network of lexical cooccurrences built from a large corpus. This method was tested both for French and English and was evaluated for English by comparing its results with WordNet.