# WiC = TSV = WSD: On the Equivalence of Three Semantic Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09121/) (2018)
- [SenseBERT: Driving Some Sense into BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05646/) (2019)
- [XL-WiC: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Semantic Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06478/) (2020)
- [WiC-TSV: An Evaluation Benchmark for Target Sense Verification of Words in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15016/) (2020)
- [LIAAD at SemDeep-5 Challenge: Word-in-Context (WiC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10002/) (2019)
- [Synonymy = Translational Equivalence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13886/) (2020)
- [MCL@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation using Augmented Data, Signals, and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01567/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Context-Gloss Augmentation for Improving Arabic Target Sense Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03126/) (2023)
- [OYXOY: A Modern NLP Test Suite for Modern Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07009/) (2023)
- [WiC is Not WSD: A Study on LLMs and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20593/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Word-in-Context (WiC) task has attracted considerable attention in the NLP community, as demonstrated by the popularity of the recent MCL-WiC SemEval shared task. Systems and lexical resources from word sense disambiguation (WSD) are often used for the WiC task and WiC dataset construction. In this paper, we establish the exact relationship between WiC and WSD, as well as the related task of target sense verification (TSV). Building upon a novel hypothesis on the equivalence of sense and meaning distinctions, we demonstrate through the application of tools from theoretical computer science that these three semantic classification problems can be pairwise reduced to each other, and therefore are equivalent. The results of experiments that involve systems and datasets for both WiC and WSD provide strong empirical evidence that our problem reductions work in practice.