  Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) is a novel challenging task that lies
between linguistic sense disambiguation and fine-grained multimodal retrieval.
The recent advancements in the development of visiolinguistic (VL) transformers
suggest some off-the-self implementations with encouraging results, which
however we argue that can be further improved. To this end, we propose some
knowledge-enhancement techniques towards improving the retrieval performance of
VL transformers via the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) as Knowledge
Bases. More specifically, knowledge stored in LLMs is retrieved with the help
of appropriate prompts in a zero-shot manner, achieving performance
advancements. Moreover, we convert VWSD to a purely textual question-answering
(QA) problem by considering generated image captions as multiple-choice
candidate answers. Zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies are leveraged to
explore the potential of such a transformation, while Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
prompting in the zero-shot setting is able to reveal the internal reasoning
steps an LLM follows to select the appropriate candidate. In total, our
presented approach is the first one to analyze the merits of exploiting
knowledge stored in LLMs in different ways to solve WVSD.
