Models and Strategies for Russian Word Sense Disambiguation: A Comparative Analysis

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a core task in computational linguistics that involves interpreting polysemous words in context by identifying senses from a predefined sense inventory. Despite the dominance of BERT and its derivatives in WSD evaluation benchmarks, their effectiveness in encoding and retrieving word senses, especially in languages other than English, remains relatively unexplored. This paper provides a detailed quantitative analysis, comparing various BERT-based models for Russian, and examines two primary WSD strategies: fine-tuning and feature-based nearest-neighbor classification. The best results are obtained with the ruBERT model coupled with the feature-based nearest neighbor strategy. This approach adeptly captures even fine-grained meanings with limited data and diverse sense distributions.