What is Word Sense Disambiguation?
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) lies at the core of software programs designed to interpret language. Ambiguous words or sentences can be understood multiple ways, though only one meaning is intended. Disambiguation seeks to decipher the intended meaning of words and sentences. This area is extremely challenging to programmers tasked with designing accurate interfaces to bridge the gap between spoken and written language, and computer-generated translations. Software designed to convert speech-to-text can “listen” to a user speaking into a microphone and translate spoken words into typed sentences. The user dictates punctuation, interjecting words like “comma” and “period” where appropriate. This sounds pretty straightforward except that many words sound exactly alike. For example, know and no or I and eye are phonetically indistinguishable. Word sense disambiguation helps to translate, “I should know by next week,” properly, by using what is basically a set of “if, then” rules that ta
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determing which meaning of a polysemous word is intended in a given context. Some words, such as English “run”, are highly ambiguous. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition lists 28 intransitive verb senses, 31 transitive verb senses, 30 nominal senses and 46 adjectival senses. The word “gallop” has a mere 4 nominal senses, and the word “subroutine” only 1 nominal sense.
