Rating Plausibility of Word Senses through Narrative Understanding
SemEval-2026 Task 5: rating how plausible a particular sense of an ambiguous word is within a short narrative. Each item is a 4-5 sentence story containing a homonym in a target sentence, with sparse contextual cues. Annotators judge, on a 1-5 scale, how plausible a given candidate sense of the homonym is in that narrative context. Built on the Ambistory dataset.
Configuration Fileconfig.yaml
This Potato config reproduces the annotation task. Save it as config.yaml and run potato start config.yaml to try it.
# Rating Plausibility of Word Senses through Narrative Understanding
# Based on Gehring, Meyer, and Roth, SemEval-2026 Task 5
# Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.448/
# Task page: https://nlu-lab.github.io/semeval.html
#
# Each item is a short (4-5 sentence) story containing an ambiguous word
# (a homonym) in a target sentence. The story deliberately offers sparse
# cues. Given one candidate sense of the homonym, annotators rate how
# plausible that sense is in the narrative on a 1-5 Likert scale
# (1 = very implausible, 5 = very plausible). Built on the Ambistory dataset.
annotation_task_name: "Word-Sense Plausibility in Narratives"
task_dir: "."
data_files:
- sample-data.json
item_properties:
id_key: "id"
text_key: "story"
output_annotation_dir: "annotation_output/"
output_annotation_format: "json"
port: 8000
server_name: localhost
annotation_schemes:
- annotation_type: likert
name: plausibility
description: "How plausible is the candidate sense of the target word in this story?"
size: 5
min_label: "Very implausible"
max_label: "Very plausible"
annotation_instructions: |
Read the short story and note the target (ambiguous) word and the
candidate sense provided. Using only the narrative context, rate how
plausible it is that the target word carries that candidate sense, on a
scale from 1 (very implausible) to 5 (very plausible).
html_layout: |
<div style="padding: 15px; max-width: 820px; margin: auto;">
<div style="background: #f0f9ff; border: 1px solid #bae6fd; border-radius: 8px; padding: 16px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<strong style="color: #0369a1;">Story:</strong>
<p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 8px 0 0 0;">{{story}}</p>
</div>
<div style="background: #fef9c3; border: 1px solid #fde047; border-radius: 8px; padding: 12px;">
<strong style="color: #854d0e;">Target word:</strong> <span>{{target_word}}</span><br/>
<strong style="color: #854d0e;">Candidate sense:</strong> <span>{{candidate_sense}}</span>
</div>
</div>
allow_all_users: true
instances_per_annotator: 50
annotation_per_instance: 5
allow_skip: true
Sample Datasample-data.json
[
{
"id": "wsp_001",
"story": "Mara had been saving for months. She finally walked down to the bank and waited in line. When it was her turn, she slid the envelope across the counter. The teller smiled and counted the bills.",
"target_word": "bank",
"candidate_sense": "a financial institution"
},
{
"id": "wsp_002",
"story": "The afternoon was hot and still. They followed the trail until it opened onto the river. Tom sat down on the bank and dipped his feet in the cool water. Dragonflies skimmed the surface.",
"target_word": "bank",
"candidate_sense": "a financial institution"
}
]
// ... and 8 more itemsGet This Design
Clone or download from the repository
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato-showcase.git cd potato-showcase/semeval/2026/task05-word-sense-plausibility potato start config.yaml
Dataset & paper
Gehring, Meyer & Roth, SemEval 2026 (Task 5)
Citation (BibTeX)
@inproceedings{gehring-etal-2026-semeval,
title = "{S}em{E}val-2026 Task 5: Rating Plausibility of Word Senses in Ambiguous Stories through Narrative Understanding",
author = "Gehring, Janosch and Meyer, Selina and Roth, Michael",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2026)",
year = "2026",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.448",
pages = "3691--3703"
}Details
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