This paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to sense-tag
systematically, and on a large scale, and how we should assess progress so far. That is to say, how to attach each occurrence of a word in a text to one and only one sense in a dictionary---a particular dictionary of course, and that is part of the problem. The paper does not propose a solution to the question, though we have reported empirical findings elsewhere [Cowie et al. 1992 and Wilks et al. 1996], and intend to continue and refine that work. The point of this paper is to examine two well-known contributions critically, one [Kilgarriff 1993] which is widely taken as showing that the task, as defined, cannot be carried out systematically by humans, and secondly [Yarowsky 1995] which claims strikingly good results at doing exactly that.