1997/12/23 by Adam Kilgarriff
Computer Science · #cmp-lg #cs.CL
published as Proc. Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium. Phuket, Thailand. December 1997. Pp 209--214. · 6 pages
arxiv created 1997/12/23 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Word sense disambiguation has developed as a sub-area of natural language processing, as if, like parsing, it was a well-defined task which was a pre-requisite to a wide range of language-understanding applications. First, I review earlier work which shows that a set of senses for a word is only ever defined relative to a particular human purpose, and that a view of word senses as part of the linguistic furniture lacks theoretical underpinnings. Then, I investigate whether and how word sense ambiguity is in fact a problem for different varieties of NLP application.