Polysemy, i.e., the property of a word of having more than one sense, is the rule rather than the exception. The degree of polysemy can be inferred in many ways: by counting the number of entries in a lexicon, by analyzing the set of a word's semantic neighbors, or by clustering contexts that a word surfaces in based on some semantic representations (e.g., BERT sentence embeddings). However, very often two senses are very similar to each other - suggesting the question of whether they are separate senses in the first place. What is more, some of a word's senses are typically more common than others. Hence, the question is: what is the actual number of senses that an individual perceives?

The goal of this project is to crowd-source subjective estimates of the number of senses for a list of several thousand English words. Based on the collected data, the perceived degree of polysemy will be computed. Crowd-sourcing costs will be covered.

Prerequisites: familiarity with SoSciSurvey and/or Prolific Academic is good but not strictly necessary; some knowledge of statistical data analysis is also desirable

Number of students: 1