It's tricky because we don't have good ground truth on what different word senses there are. (WordNet is not the final answer, especially as it separates every metaphorical use of the same word into its own sense.)
My experience is that you can distinguish word senses, but it seems the data isn't good enough to improve anything but a task that specifically evaluates that same vocabulary of word senses.
I see a sibling comment with link to spaCy's sense2vec, which uses the coarsest possible senses -- one sense for nouns, one sense for verbs, one sense for proper nouns, etc. It's a start.
My experience is that you can distinguish word senses, but it seems the data isn't good enough to improve anything but a task that specifically evaluates that same vocabulary of word senses.
I see a sibling comment with link to spaCy's sense2vec, which uses the coarsest possible senses -- one sense for nouns, one sense for verbs, one sense for proper nouns, etc. It's a start.