In this paper, we investigate whether an a priori disambiguation of word senses is strictly necessary or whether the meaning of a word in context can be disambiguated through composition alone. We evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf single-vector and multi-sense vector models on a benchmark phrase similarity task and a novel task for word-sense discrimination. We find that single-sense vector models perform as well or better than multi-sense vector models despite arguably less clean elementary representations. Our findings furthermore show that simple composition functions such as pointwise addition are able to recover sense specific information from a single-sense vector model remarkably well.
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