Colexification occurs when two distinct concepts are lexified by the same word.The term covers both polysemy and homonymy.We posit and investigate the hypothesis that no pair of concepts are colexified in every language.We test our hypothesis by analyzing colexification data from BabelNet, Open Multilingual WordNet, and CLICS.The results show that our hypothesis is supported by over 99.9% of colexified concept pairs in these three lexical resources.

Deciding whether a semantically ambiguous word is homonymous or polysemous is equivalent to establishing whether it has any pair of senses that are semantically unrelated.We present novel methods for this task that leverage information from multilingual lexical resources.We formally prove the theoretical properties that provide the foundation for our methods.In particular, we show how the One Homonym Per Translation hypothesis of Hauer and Kondrak (2020a) follows from the synset properties formulated by Hauer and Kondrak (2020b).Experimental evaluation shows that our approach sets a new state of the art for homonymy detection.