Enhanced Visual Word Sense Disambiguation for Italian

Enhanced-VWSD for Italian is a task of EVALITA 2026. The task is based on the VWSD task proposed at SemEval 2023. In this task, the objective is to select an image, out of ten possible candidates, which correctly represents the sense of a target word in an input sentence. The sentence consists of a word of interest (that is, the target to disambiguate) and additional context words to support disambiguation.

We propose a new task that combines both high-level and fine-grained semantics. The goal is not only to identify the broad sense of the target word, but also to accurately recognise its specific sense. We propose using co-Hyponyms extracted from a semantic network to find hard negatives. That is, the images are related to the general sense of the target word, but they represent a different specific sense. We propose to improve the task by mixing the two types of images: 1. images for other senses of the target word (therefore, the same as the original VWSD challenge); 2. images that share the same broad sense as the target word.