Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be
effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into
downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning.
We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and
highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency,
which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a
single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a
transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses
(in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical
meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in
the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and
knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and
applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four
of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to
different domains and compositionality.

此研究综述了分布式语义表示的理论背景，介绍了从单词级别向更精细的词义级别转化的方法，并提供了对两种主要分支进行的广泛技术概述；最终，对其重要方面进行了分析与评估。