34. The method of claim 23, further comprising the steps of: identifying within the identified plurality of lexical paths a third node representing a third occurrence of the third word, the third node having a word sense characterization; and determining to copy to the first node the word sense characterization of the second node rather than the word sense characterization of the third node based upon a characteristic of the second node.
23. A method in a computer system, the method performed in a lexical knowledge base derived from one or more dictionaries, the lexical knowledge base comprising a network of nodes each representing a word occurrence in the dictionaries, the lexical knowledge base containing text segment subgraphs each comprising a plurality of nodes and derived from dictionary text segments, the method characterizing the sense of an occurrence of a polysemous word represented as a node of the lexical knowledge base and comprising the steps of: (a) selecting a pair of words having a high level of semantic coherency; (b) identifying in the lexical knowledge base a plurality of text segment subgraphs between the words of the pair; (c) identifying within the identified plurality of text segment subgraphs a first node having no word sense characterization and representing a first occurrence of a first word; (d) identifying within the identified plurality of text segment subgraphs a second node having a word sense characterization and representing a second occurrence of the second word; and (e) copying the word sense characterization of the second node to the first node.