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

The WiC task has attracted considerable attention in the NLP community, as demonstrated by the popularity of the recent MCL-WiC SemEval task. WSD systems and lexical resources have been used for the WiC task, as well as for WiC dataset construction. TSV is another task related to both WiC and WSD. We aim to establish the exact relationship between WiC, TSV, and WSD. We demonstrate that these semantic classification problems can be pairwise reduced to each other, and so they are theoretically equivalent. We analyze the existing WiC datasets to validate this equivalence hypothesis. We conclude that our understanding of semantic tasks can be increased through the applications of tools from theoretical computer science. Our findings also suggests that more efficient and simpler methods for one of these tasks could be successfully applied in the other two.