The main purpose of the workshop is to discuss recent results in word sense disambiguation (WSD), with reference to SENSEVAL-2. The second purpose is to begin planning SENSEVAL-3, the next evaluation exercise for WSD systems.

SENSEVAL-2, held 5-6 July 2001 in conjunction with ACL-01, unveiled the results of over 90 systems submitted by 35 teams to tasks in 10 different languages. At the time, it was not possible to do any in-depth analysis, so it was agreed to organize a follow-up workshop in 2002 after sufficient analysis could be done.