  Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determining the sense of a
word in context. Translations have been used in WSD as a source of knowledge,
and even as a means of delimiting word senses. In this paper, we define three
theoretical properties of the relationship between senses and translations, and
argue that they constitute necessary conditions for using translations as sense
inventories. The key property of One Sense per Translation (OSPT) provides a
foundation for a translation-based WSD method. The results of an intrinsic
evaluation experiment indicate that our method achieves a precision of
approximately 93% compared to manual corpus annotations. Our extrinsic
evaluation experiments demonstrate WSD improvements of up to 4.6% F1-score on
difficult WSD datasets.
