Polysemy is the type of lexical ambiguity where a word has multiple distinct but related interpretations. In the past decade, it has been the subject of a great many studies across multiple disciplines including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics, which have made it increasingly clear that the complexity of polysemy precludes simple, universal answers, especially concerning the representation and processing of polysemous words. But fuelled by the growing availability of large, crowdsourced datasets providing substantial empirical evidence; improved behavioral methodology; and the development of contextualized language models capable of encoding the fine-grained meaning of a word within a given context, the literature on polysemy recently has developed more complex theoretical analyses.

In this survey we discuss these recent contributions to the investigation of polysemy against the backdrop of a long legacy of research across multiple decades and disciplines. Our aim is to bring together different perspectives to achieve a more complete picture of the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomenon of polysemy. Specifically, we highlight evidence supporting a range of hybrid models of the mental processing of polysemes. These hybrid models combine elements from different previous theoretical approaches to explain patterns and idiosyncrasies in the processing of polysemous that the best known models so far have failed to account for. Our literature review finds that (i) traditional analyses of polysemy can be limited in their generalizability by loose definitions and selective materials; (ii) linguistic tests provide useful evidence on individual cases, but fail to capture the full range of factors involved in the processing of polysemous sense extensions; and (iii) recent behavioral (psycho) linguistics studies, large-scale annotation efforts, and investigations leveraging contextualized language models provide accumulating evidence suggesting that polysemous sense similarity covers a wide spectrum between identity of sense and homonymy-like unrelatedness of meaning.

We hope that the interdisciplinary account of polysemy provided in this survey inspires further fundamental research on the nature of polysemy and better equips applied research to deal with the complexity surrounding the phenomenon, for example, by enabling the development of benchmarks and testing paradigms for large language models informed by a greater portion of the rich evidence on the phenomenon currently available.

一词多义是一种词汇歧义，一个词有多种不同但相关的解释。在过去的十年中，它已经成为语言学、心理学、神经科学和计算语言学等多个学科的大量研究的主题，这些研究越来越清楚地表明，一词多义的复杂性排除了简单、普遍的答案，尤其是在表示方面以及多义词的处理。但由于大型众包数据集的可用性不断增加，提供了大量的经验证据；改进的行为方法论；随着能够在给定上下文中编码单词的细粒度含义的上下文化语言模型的发展，有关一词多义的文献最近发展了更复杂的理论分析。

在本次调查中，我们在跨越数十年和跨学科的长期研究遗产的背景下讨论了最近对一词多义调查的贡献。我们的目标是汇集不同的观点，以更全面地了解一词多义现象的异质性和复杂性。具体来说，我们强调支持一系列多义词心理处理混合模型的证据。这些混合模型结合了先前不同理论方法的元素，来解释多义词处理中的模式和特质，而迄今为止最著名的模型未能解释这一点。我们的文献综述发现，（i）传统的一词多义分析可能因松散的定义和选择性的材料而限制其普遍性； (ii) 语言测试为个别案例提供了有用的证据，但未能捕获多义词义扩展处理中涉及的全部因素； (iii) 最近的行为（心理）语言学研究、大规模注释工作以及利用情境化语言模型的调查提供了越来越多的证据，表明多义意义相似性涵盖了意义的同一性和意义的同名异义性之间的广泛范围。

我们希望本次调查中提供的多义词跨学科解释能够激发对多义词本质的进一步基础研究，并更好地装备应用研究来处理围绕这一现象的复杂性，例如，通过为大语言开发基准和测试范式模型的基础是现有现象的大部分丰富证据。