EVWSD-ITA at EVALITA 2026: Overview of the Enhanced Visual Word Sense Disambiguation for Italian Task

Elio Musacchio, Lucia Siciliani, Pierpaolo Basile, Giovanni Semeraro

Keywords: Word Sense Disambiguation, Visual Word Sense Disambiguation, Dataset, Evaluation

Abstract:

EVWSD-ITA (Enhanced Visual Word Sense Disambiguation for Italian) is a shared task proposed at the EVALITA
2026 campaign. While traditional Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) focuses on broad semantic
distinctions, EVWSD-ITA introduces a more rigorous challenge by requiring systems to perform fine-grained
disambiguation. The task involves selecting the most appropriate image for a target word within a given context,
specifically designed to include "hard negatives"—co-hyponyms that share a common hypernym but represent
distinct concepts. The dataset was meticulously constructed, comprising a manually validated test set. In this
report, we showcase the dataset construction procedure and the results of the task.

Email Sharing: We authorize the sharing of all author emails with Program Chairs.

Data Release: We authorize the release of our submission and author names to the public in the event of acceptance.

Submission Number: 7