HY or Hy can mean:

• Armenian language ISO 639 alpha-2 code
• IATA code for Uzbekistan Airways
• An abbreviation for Helsingin yliopisto, which is Finnish for University of Helsinki
• An abbreviation for Hell Yes!
• An abbreviation for Hollywood
• An abbreviation for Henry
• HY (band), a Japanese band
• Two letter code for Hyatt hotels used by CRS
• High-Yield steel
• A gender neutral pronoun
• In molecular biology, hy denotes a mutation causing hyperactivity of the affected gene or protein product

Iona

• Hy Abbey, an old name for island and hence Iona Abbey
• Hy (island), an pre-Christian and early Christian name for Iona, (See the Etymology section in the link)

People[link]

• Hy Buller, a Canadian-born US All-Star NHL hockey player
• Patricia Hy-Boulais, a former Hong Kongese/Canadian tennis player

See also[link]

• HI (disambiguation)
• High (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open problem of natural language processing, which governs the process of identifying which sense of a word (i.e. meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings (polysemy). The solution to this problem impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, inference et cetera.

Research has progressed steadily to the point where WSD systems achieve sufficiently high levels of accuracy on a variety of word types and ambiguities. A rich variety of techniques have been researched, from dictionary-based methods that use the knowledge encoded in lexical resources, to supervised machine learning methods in which a classifier is trained for each distinct word on a corpus of manually sense-annotated examples, to completely unsupervised methods that cluster occurrences of words, thereby inducing word senses. Among these, supervised learning approaches have been the most successful algorithms to date.

Current accuracy is difficult to state without a host of caveats. In English, accuracy at the coarse-grained (homograph) level is routinely above 90%, with some methods on particular homographs achieving over 96%. On finer-grained sense distinctions, top accuracies from 59.1% to 69.0% have been reported in recent evaluation exercises (SemEval-2007, Senseval-2), where the baseline accuracy of the simplest possible algorithm of always choosing the most frequent sense was 51.4% and 57%, respectively.

About[link]

A disambiguation process requires two strict things: a dictionary to specify the senses which are to be disambiguated and a corpus of language data to be disambiguated (in some methods, a training corpus of language examples is also required). WSD task has two variants: "lexical sample" and "all words" task. The former comprises disambiguating the occurrences of a small sample of target words which were previously selected, while in the latter all the words in a piece of running text need to be disambiguated. The latter is deemed a more realistic form of evaluation, but the corpus is more expensive to produce because human annotators have to read the definitions for each word in the sequence every time they need to make a tagging judgement, rather than once for a block of instances for the same target word.

To give a hint how all this works, consider two examples of the distinct senses that exist for the (written) word "bass":

1. a type of fish
2. tones of low frequency

and the sentences:

1. I went fishing for some sea bass.
2. The bass line of the song is too weak.

To a human, it is obvious that the first sentence is using the word "bass (fish)", as in the former sense above and in the second sentence, the word "bass (instrument)" is being used as in the latter sense below. Developing algorithms to replicate this human ability can often be a difficult task, as is further exemplified by the implicit equivocation between "bass (sound)" and "bass" (musical instrument).

History[link]

WSD was first formulated as a distinct computational task during the early days of machine translation in the 1940s, making it one of the oldest problems in computational linguistics. Warren Weaver, in his famous 1949 memorandum on translation,^[1] first introduced the problem in a computational context. Early researchers understood the significance and difficulty of WSD well. In fact, Bar-Hillel (1960) used the above example to argue^[2] that WSD could not be solved by "electronic computer" because of the need in general to model all world knowledge.

In the 1970s, WSD was a subtask of semantic interpretation systems developed within the field of artificial intelligence, but since WSD systems were largely rule-based and hand-coded they were prone to a knowledge acquisition bottleneck.

By the 1980s large-scale lexical resources, such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (OALD), became available: hand-coding was replaced with knowledge automatically extracted from these resources, but disambiguation was still knowledge-based or dictionary-based.

In the 1990s, the statistical revolution swept through computational linguistics, and WSD became a paradigm problem on which to apply supervised machine learning techniques.

The 2000s saw supervised techniques reach a plateau in accuracy, and so attention has shifted to coarser-grained senses, domain adaptation, semi-supervised and unsupervised corpus-based systems, combinations of different methods, and the return of knowledge-based systems via graph-based methods. Still, supervised systems continue to perform best.

Difficulties[link]

Differences between dictionaries[link]

One problem with word sense disambiguation is deciding what the senses are. In cases like the word bass above, at least some senses are obviously different. In other cases, however, the different senses can be closely related (one meaning being a metaphorical or metonymic extension of another), and in such cases division of words into senses becomes much more difficult. Different dictionaries and thesauruses will provide different divisions of words into senses. One solution some researchers have used is to choose a particular dictionary, and just use its set of senses. Generally, however, research results using broad distinctions in senses have been much better than those using narrow ones.^[3][4] However, given the lack of a full-fledged coarse-grained sense inventory, most researchers continue to work on fine-grained WSD.

Most research in the field of WSD is performed by using WordNet as a reference sense inventory for English. WordNet is a computational lexicon that encodes concepts as synonym sets (e.g. the concept of car is encoded as { car, auto, automobile, machine, motorcar }). Other resources used for disambiguation purposes include Roget's Thesaurus^[5] and Wikipedia.^[6]

Part-of-speech tagging[link]

In any real test, part-of-speech tagging and sense tagging are very closely related with each potentially making constraints to the other. And the question whether these tasks should be kept together or decoupled is still not unanimously resolved, but recently scientists incline to test these things separately (e.g. in the Senseval/SemEval competitions parts of speech are provided as input for the text to disambiguate).

It is instructive to compare the word sense disambiguation problem with the problem of part-of-speech tagging. Both involve disambiguating or tagging with words, be it with senses or parts of speech. However, algorithms used for one do not tend to work well for the other, mainly because the part of speech of a word is primarily determined by the immediately adjacent one to three words, whereas the sense of a word may be determined by words further away. The success rate for part-of-speech tagging algorithms is at present much higher than that for WSD, state-of-the art being around 95% accuracy or better, as compared to less than 75% accuracy in word sense disambiguation with supervised learning. These figures are typical for English, and may be very different from those for other languages.

Inter-judge variance[link]

Another problem is inter-judge variance. WSD systems are normally tested by having their results on a task compared against those of a human. However, while it is relatively easy to assign parts of speech to text, training people to tag senses is far more difficult.^[7] While users can memorize all of the possible parts of speech a word can take, it is often impossible for individuals to memorize all of the senses a word can take. Moreover, humans do not agree on the task at hand – give a list of senses and sentences, and humans will not always agree on which word belongs in which sense.^[8]

Thus, a computer cannot be expected to give better performance on such a task than a human (indeed, since the human serves as the standard, the computer being better than the human is incoherent),^{[citation needed]} so the human performance serves as an upper bound. Human performance, however, is much better on coarse-grained than fine-grained distinctions, so this again is why research on coarse-grained distinctions^[9][10] has been put to test in recent WSD evaluation exercises.^[3][4]

Common sense[link]

Some AI researchers like Douglas Lenat argue that one cannot parse meanings from words without some form of common sense ontology. For example, comparing these two sentences:

• "Jill and Mary are sisters." – (they are sisters of each other).
• "Jill and Mary are mothers." – (each is independently a mother).

To properly identify senses of words one must know common sense facts.^[11] Moreover, sometimes the common sense is needed to disambiguate such words like pronouns in case of having anaphoras or cataphoras in the text.

Sense inventory and algorithms' task-dependency[link]

A task-independent sense inventory is not a coherent concept^[12]: each task requires its own division of word meaning into senses relevant to the task. For example, the ambiguity of 'mouse' (animal or device) is not relevant in English-French machine translation, but is relevant in information retrieval. The opposite is true of 'river', which requires a choice in French (fleuve 'flows into the sea', or rivière 'flows into a river').

Also, completely different algorithms might be required by different applications. In machine translation, the problem takes the form of target word selection. Here, the "senses" are words in the target language, which often correspond to significant meaning distinctions in the source language ("bank" could translate to the French "banque" -- that is, 'financial bank' or "rive" -- that is, 'edge of river'). In information retrieval, a sense inventory is not necessarily required, because it is enough to know that a word is used in the same sense in the query and a retrieved document; what sense that is, is unimportant.

Discreteness of senses[link]

Finally, the very notion of "word sense" is slippery and controversial. Most people can agree in distinctions at the coarse-grained homograph level (e.g., pen as writing instrument or enclosure), but go down one level to fine-grained polysemy, and disagreements arise. For example, in Senseval-2, which used fine-grained sense distinctions, human annotators agreed in only 85% of word occurrences.^[13] Word meaning is in principle infinitely variable and context sensitive. It does not divide up easily into distinct or discrete sub-meanings.^[14] Lexicographers frequently discover in corpora loose and overlapping word meanings, and standard or conventional meanings extended, modulated, and exploited in a bewildering variety of ways. The art of lexicography is to generalize from the corpus to definitions that evoke and explain the full range of meaning of a word, making it seem like words are well-behaved semantically. However, it is not at all clear if these same meaning distinctions are applicable in computational applications, as the decisions of lexicographers are usually driven by other considerations. Recently, a task – named lexical substitution – has been proposed as a possible solution to the sense discreteness problem.^[15] The task consists of providing a substitute for a word in context that preserves the meaning of the original word (potentially, substitutes can be chosen from the full lexicon of the target language, thus overcoming discreteness).

Approaches and methods[link]

As in all natural language processing, there are two main approaches to WSD – deep approaches and shallow approaches.

Deep approaches presume access to a comprehensive body of world knowledge. Knowledge, such as "you can go fishing for a type of fish, but not for low frequency sounds" and "songs have low frequency sounds as parts, but not types of fish", is then used to determine in which sense the word is used. These approaches are not very successful in practice, mainly because such a body of knowledge does not exist in a computer-readable format, outside of very limited domains.^[16] However, if such knowledge did exist, then deep approaches would be much more accurate than the shallow approaches.^{[citation needed]} Also, there is a long tradition in computational linguistics, of trying such approaches in terms of coded knowledge and in some cases, it is hard to say clearly whether the knowledge involved is linguistic or world knowledge. The first attempt was that by Margaret Masterman and her colleagues, at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in England, in the 1950s. This attempt used as data a punched-card version of Roget's Thesaurus and its numbered "heads", as an indicator of topics and looked for repetitions in text, using a set intersection algorithm. It was not very successful,^[17] but had strong relationships to later work, especially Yarowsky's machine learning optimisation of a thesaurus method in the 1990s.

Shallow approaches don't try to understand the text. They just consider the surrounding words, using information such as "if bass has words sea or fishing nearby, it probably is in the fish sense; if bass has the words music or song nearby, it is probably in the music sense." These rules can be automatically derived by the computer, using a training corpus of words tagged with their word senses. This approach, while theoretically not as powerful as deep approaches, gives superior results in practice, due to the computer's limited world knowledge. However, it can be confused by sentences like The dogs bark at the tree which contains the word bark near both tree and dogs.

There are four conventional approaches to WSD:

• Dictionary- and knowledge-based methods: These rely primarily on dictionaries, thesauri, and lexical knowledge bases, without using any corpus evidence.
• Supervised methods: These make use of sense-annotated corpora to train from.
• Semi-supervised or minimally supervised methods: These make use of a secondary source of knowledge such as a small annotated corpus as seed data in a bootstrapping process, or a word-aligned bilingual corpus.
• Unsupervised methods: These eschew (almost) completely external information and work directly from raw unannotated corpora. These methods are also known under the name of word sense discrimination.

Almost all these approaches normally work by defining a window of n content words around each word to be disambiguated in the corpus, and statistically analyzing those n surrounding words. Two shallow approaches used to train and then disambiguate are Naïve Bayes classifiers and decision trees. In recent research, kernel-based methods such as support vector machines have shown superior performance in supervised learning. Graph-based approaches have also gained much attention from the research community, and currently achieve performance close to the state of the art.

Dictionary- and knowledge-based methods[link]

The Lesk algorithm^[18] is the seminal dictionary-based method. It is based on the hypothesis that words used together in text are related to each other and that the relation can be observed in the definitions of the words and their senses. Two (or more) words are disambiguated by finding the pair of dictionary senses with the greatest word overlap in their dictionary definitions. For example, when disambiguating the words in "pine cone", the definitions of the appropriate senses both include the words evergreen and tree (at least in one dictionary).

An alternative to the use of the definitions is to consider general word-sense relatedness and to compute the semantic similarity of each pair of word senses based on a given lexical knowledge base such as WordNet. Graph-based methods reminiscent of spreading activation research of the early days of AI research have been applied with some success. More complex graph-based approaches have been shown to perform almost as well as supervised methods^[19] or even outperforming them on specific domains.^[3][20] Recently, it has been reported that simple graph connectivity measures, such as degree, perform state-of-the-art WSD in the presence of a sufficiently rich lexical knowledge base.^[21] Also, automatically transferring knowledge in the form of semantic relations from Wikipedia to WordNet has been shown to boost simple knowledge-based methods, enabling them to rival the best supervised systems and even outperform them in a domain-specific setting.^[22]

The use of selectional preferences (or selectional restrictions) is also useful, for example, knowing that one typically cooks food, one can disambiguate the word bass in "I am cooking basses" (i.e., it's not a musical instrument).

Supervised methods[link]

Supervised methods are based on the assumption that the context can provide enough evidence on its own to disambiguate words (hence, world knowledge and reasoning are deemed unnecessary). Probably every machine learning algorithm going has been applied to WSD, including associated techniques such as feature selection, parameter optimization, and ensemble learning. Support Vector Machines and memory-based learning have been shown to be the most successful approaches, to date, probably because they can cope with the high-dimensionality of the feature space. However, these supervised methods are subject to a new knowledge acquisition bottleneck since they rely on substantial amounts of manually sense-tagged corpora for training, which are laborious and expensive to create.

Semi-supervised methods[link]

Because of the lack of training data, many word sense disambiguation algorithms use semi-supervised learning, which allows both labeled and unlabeled data. The Yarowsky algorithm was an early example of such an algorithm.^[23] It uses the ‘One sense per collocation’ and the ‘One sense per discourse’ properties of human languages for word sense disambiguation. From observation, words tend to exhibit only one sense in most given discourse and in a given collocation.

The bootstrapping approach starts from a small amount of seed data for each word: either manually tagged training examples or a small number of surefire decision rules (e.g., 'play' in the context of 'bass' almost always indicates the musical instrument). The seeds are used to train an initial classifier, using any supervised method. This classifier is then used on the untagged portion of the corpus to extract a larger training set, in which only the most confident classifications are included. The process repeats, each new classifier being trained on a successively larger training corpus, until the whole corpus is consumed, or until a given maximum number of iterations is reached.

Other semi-supervised techniques use large quantities of untagged corpora to provide co-occurrence information that supplements the tagged corpora. These techniques have the potential to help in the adaptation of supervised models to different domains.

Also, an ambiguous word in one language is often translated into different words in a second language depending on the sense of the word. Word-aligned bilingual corpora have been used to infer cross-lingual sense distinctions, a kind of semi-supervised system.

Unsupervised methods[link]

Unsupervised learning is the greatest challenge for WSD researchers. The underlying assumption is that similar senses occur in similar contexts, and thus senses can be induced from text by clustering word occurrences using some measure of similarity of context,^[24] a task referred to as word sense induction or discrimination. Then, new occurrences of the word can be classified into the closest induced clusters/senses. Performance has been lower than other methods, above, but comparisons are difficult since senses induced must be mapped to a known dictionary of word senses. If a mapping to a set of dictionary senses is not desired, cluster-based evaluations (including measures of entropy and purity) can be performed. Alternatively, word sense induction methods can be tested and compared within an application. For instance, it has been shown that word sense induction improves Web search result clustering by increasing the quality of result clusters and the degree diversification of result lists.^[25] It is hoped that unsupervised learning will overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck because they are not dependent on manual effort.

Other approaches[link]

Other approaches may vary differently in their methods:

• Identification of dominant word senses;^[26][27][28]
• Domain-driven disambiguation;^[29][30]
• WSD using Cross-Lingual Evidence.^[31][32]

Local impediments and summary[link]

The knowledge acquisition bottleneck is perhaps the major impediment to solving the WSD problem. Unsupervised methods rely on knowledge about word senses, which is barely formulated in dictionaries and lexical databases. Supervised methods depend crucially on the existence of manually annotated examples for every word sense, a requisite that can so far be met only for a handful of words for testing purposes, as it is done in the Senseval exercises.

Therefore, one of the most promising trends in WSD research is using the largest corpus ever accessible, the World Wide Web, to acquire lexical information automatically.^[33] WSD has been traditionally understood as an intermediate language engineering technology which could improve applications such as information retrieval (IR). In this case, however, the reverse is also true: Web search engines implement simple and robust IR techniques that can be successfully used when mining the Web for information to be employed in WSD. Therefore, the lack of training data provoked appearing some new algorithms and techniques described here:

External knowledge sources[link]

Knowledge is a fundamental component of WSD. Knowledge sources provide data which are essential to associate senses with words. They can vary from corpora of texts, either unlabeled or annotated with word senses, to machine-readable dictionaries, thesauri, glossaries, ontologies, etc. They can be^[34][35] classified as follows:

1. Structured:
   • Thesauri
   • Machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs)
   • Ontologies
2. Unstructured:
   • Corpora: raw corpora and sense-annotated corpora
   • Collocation resources
   • Other resources (such as word frequency lists, stoplists, domain labels,^[36] etc.)

Evaluation[link]

Comparing and evaluating different WSD systems is extremely difficult, because of the different test sets, sense inventories, and knowledge resources adopted. Before the organization of specific evaluation campaigns most systems were assessed on in-house, often small-scale, data sets. In order to test one's algorithm, developers should spend their time to annotate all word occurrences. And comparing methods even on the same corpus is not eligible if there is different sense inventories.

In order to define common evaluation datasets and procedures, public evaluation campaigns have been organized. Senseval (now renamed SemEval) is an international word sense disambiguation competition, held every three years since 1998: Senseval-1 (1998), Senseval-2 (2001), Senseval-3 (2004), and its successor, SemEval (2007). The objective of the competition is to organize different lectures, preparing and hand-annotating corpus for testing systems, perform a comparative evaluation of WSD systems in several kinds of tasks, including all-words and lexical sample WSD for different languages, and, more recently, new tasks such as semantic role labeling, gloss WSD, lexical substitution, etc. The systems submitted for evaluation to these competitions usually integrate different techniques and often combine supervised and knowledge-based methods (especially for avoiding bad performance in lack of training examples).

Task Design Choices[link]

Sense Inventories. During the first Senseval workshop the HECTOR sense inventory was adopted. The reason for adopting a previously unknown sense inventory was mainly to avoid the use of popular fine-grained word senses (such as WordNet), which could make the experiments unfair or biased. However, given the lack of coverage of such inventories, since the second Senseval workshop the WordNet sense inventory has been adopted.

A set of testing words. Comparison of methods can be divided in 2 groups by amount of words to test. The difference consists in the amount of analysis and processing:

• all-words task implies disambiguating all the words of the text
• lexical sample consists in disambiguating some previously chosen target words.

It is assumed that the former one is more realistic evaluation, although with very laborious testing of results. Initially only the latter was used in evaluation but later the former was included.

Lexical sample organizers had to choose samples on which the systems were to be tested. A criticism of earlier forays into lexical-sample WSD evaluation is that the lexical sample had been chosen according to the whim of the experimenter (or, to coincide with earlier experimenters' selections). For English Senseval, a sampling frame was devised in which words were classified according to their frequency (in the BNC) and their polysemy level (in WordNet). Also, inclusion POS-tagging problem was a matter of discussion and it was decided that samples should be words with known part of speech and some indeterminants (for ex. 15 noun tasks, 13 verb tasks, 8 adjectives, and 5 indeterminates).

Baselines. For comparison purposes, known, yet simple, algorithms named baselines are used. These include different variants of Lesk algorithm or most frequent sense algorithm.

Sense inventory. WSD exercises require a dictionary, to specify the word senses which are to be disambiguated, and a corpus of language data to be disambiguated. WordNet is the most popular example of sense inventory. The reason for adopting the HECTOR database during Senseval-1 was that the WordNet inventory was already publicly available.^[37]

Evaluation measures. During the evaluation of WSD systems two main performance measures are used:

• Precision: the fraction of system assignments made that are correct
• Recall: the fraction of total word instances correctly assigned by a system

If a system makes an assignment for every word, then precision and recall are the same, and can be called accuracy. This model has been extended to take into account systems that return a set of senses with weights for each occurrence.

Software[link]

• WordNet::SenseRelate, is a project that includes free, open source systems for word sense disambiguation and lexical sample sense disambiguation.
• UKB: Graph Base WSD, is a collection of programs for performing graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation and lexical similarity/relatedness using a pre-existing Lexical Knowledge Base (LKB).

See also[link]

• Ambiguity
• Lesk algorithm
• Lexical substitution
• Part-of-speech tagging
• Polysemy
• Semeval
• Syntactic ambiguity
• Word sense
• Word sense induction

Notes[link]

Works cited[link]

• Agirre, E.; Lopez de Lacalle, A.; Soroa, A. (2009) "Knowledge-based WSD on Specific Domains: Performing better than Generic Supervised WSD" Proc. of IJCAI http://www.ijcai.org/papers09/Papers/IJCAI09-251.pdf 
• Agirre, E.; M. Stevenson. 2006. Knowledge sources for WSD. In Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and Applications, E. Agirre and P. Edmonds, Eds. Springer, New York, NY.
• Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and information. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 
• Buitelaar, P.; B. Magnini, C. Strapparava and P. Vossen. 2006. Domain-specific WSD. In Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and Applications, E. Agirre and P. Edmonds, Eds. Springer, New York, NY.
• Chan, Y. S.; H. T. Ng. 2005. Scaling up word sense disambiguation via parallel texts. In Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, Pittsburgh, PA).
• Edmonds, P. 2000. Designing a task for SENSEVAL-2. Tech. note. University of Brighton, Brighton. U.K.
• Fellbaum, Christiane (1997) "Analysis of a handwriting task" Proc. of ANLP-97 Workshop on Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How? Washington D.C., USA 
• Gliozzo, A.; B. Magnini and C. Strapparava. 2004. Unsupervised domain relevance estimation for word sense disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, Barcelona, Spain).
• Ide, N.; T. Erjavec, D. Tufis. 2002. Sense discrimination with parallel corpora. In Proceedings of ACL Workshop on Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Successes and Future Directions (Philadelphia, PA).
• Kilgarriff, A. 1997. I don't believe in word senses. Comput. Human. 31(2), pp. 91–113.
• Kilgarriff, A.; G. Grefenstette. 2003. Introduction to the special issue on the Web as corpus. Computational Linguistics 29(3), pp. 333–347
• Kilgarriff, Adam; Joseph Rosenzweig, English Senseval: Report and Results May–June, 2000, University of Brighton
• Lapata, M.; and F. Keller. 2007. An information retrieval approach to sense ranking. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL, Rochester, NY).
• Lenat, D. "Computers versus Common Sense". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSrUHGaUE_c. Retrieved 2008-12-10.  (GoogleTachTalks on YouTube)
• Lenat, D.; R. V. Guha. 1989. Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems, Addison-Wesley
• Lesk; M. 1986. Automatic sense disambiguation using machine readable dictionaries: How to tell a pine cone from an ice cream cone. In Proc. of SIGDOC-86: 5th International Conference on Systems Documentation, Toronto, Canada.
• Litkowski, K. C. 2005. Computational lexicons and dictionaries. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.), K. R. Brown, Ed. Elsevier Publishers, Oxford, U.K.
• Magnini, B; G. Cavaglià. 2000. Integrating subject field codes into WordNet. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC, Athens, Greece).
• McCarthy, D.; R. Koeling, J. Weeds, J. Carroll. 2007. Unsupervised acquisition of predominant word senses. Computational Linguistics 33(4): 553–590.
• McCarthy, D.; R. Navigli. 2009. The English Lexical Substitution Task, Language Resources and Evaluation, 43(2), Springer.
• Mihalcea, R. 2007. Using Wikipedia for Automatic Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proc. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2007), Rochester, April 2007.
• Mohammad, S; G. Hirst. 2006. Determining word sense dominance using a thesaurus. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL, Trento, Italy).
• Navigli, R. 2006. Meaningful Clustering of Senses Helps Boost Word Sense Disambiguation Performance. Proc. of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics joint with the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL 2006), Sydney, Australia.
• Navigli, R.; G. Crisafulli. Inducing Word Senses to Improve Web Search Result Clustering. Proc. of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2010), MIT Stata Center, Massachusetts, USA.
• Navigli, R.; M. Lapata. An Experimental Study of Graph Connectivity for Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 32(4), IEEE Press, 2010.
• Navigli, R.; K. Litkowski, O. Hargraves. 2007. SemEval-2007 Task 07: Coarse-Grained English All-Words Task. Proc. of Semeval-2007 Workshop (SemEval), in the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007), Prague, Czech Republic.
• Navigli, R.;P. Velardi. 2005. Structural Semantic Interconnections: a Knowledge-Based Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 27(7).
• Palmer, M.; O. Babko-Malaya and H. T. Dang. 2004. Different sense granularities for different applications. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding Systems in HLT/NAACL (Boston, MA).
• Ponzetto, S. P.; R. Navigli. Knowledge-rich Word Sense Disambiguation rivaling supervised systems. In Proc. of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2010.
• Pradhan, S.; E. Loper, D. Dligach, M. Palmer. 2007. SemEval-2007 Task 17: English lexical sample, SRL and all words. Proc. of Semeval-2007 Workshop (SEMEVAL), in the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007), Prague, Czech Republic.
• Schütze, H. 1998. Automatic word sense discrimination. Computational Linguistics, 24(1): 97–123.
• Snow, R.; S. Prakash, D. Jurafsky, A. Y. Ng. 2007. Learning to Merge Word Senses, Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL).
• Snyder, B.; M. Palmer. 2004. The English all-words task. In Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text (Senseval-3), Barcelona, Spain.
• Weaver, Warren (1949). "Translation". In Locke, W.N.; Booth, A.D.. Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTNI-22-1999.pdf. 
• Wilks, Y.; B. Slator, L. Guthrie. 1996. Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Yarowsky, D. Word-sense disambiguation using statistical models of Roget's categories trained on large corpora. In Proc. of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics (COLING), 1992.
• Yarowsky, D. 1995. Unsupervised word sense disambiguation rivaling supervised methods. In Proc. of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

External links and suggested reading[link]

Look up disambiguation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Computational Linguistics Special Issue on Word Sense Disambiguation (1998)
• Evaluation Exercises for Word Sense Disambiguation The de-facto standard benchmarks for WSD systems.
• Roberto Navigli. Word Sense Disambiguation: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, 41(2), 2009, pp. 1–69. An up-to-date state of the art of the field.
• Word Sense Disambiguation as defined in Scholarpedia
• Word Sense Disambiguation: The State of the Art (PDF) A comprehensive overview By Prof. Nancy Ide & Jean Véronis (1998).
• Word Sense Disambiguation Tutorial, by Rada Mihalcea and Ted Pedersen (2005).
• Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and Applications, edited by Eneko Agirre and Philip Edmonds (2006), Springer. Covers the entire field with chapters contributed by leading researchers. www.wsdbook.org site of the book
• Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1964. Language and Information. New York: Addison-Wesley.
• Edmonds, Philip & Adam Kilgarriff. 2002. Introduction to the special issue on evaluating word sense disambiguation systems. Journal of Natural Language Engineering, 8(4):279-291.
• Edmonds, Philip. 2005. Lexical disambiguation. The Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Ed., ed. by Keith Brown, 607-23. Oxford: Elsevier.
• Ide, Nancy & Jean Véronis. 1998. Word sense disambiguation: The state of the art. Computational Linguistics, 24(1):1-40.
• Jurafsky, Daniel & James H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language Processing. New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall.
• Litkowski, K. C. 2005. Computational lexicons and dictionaries. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.), K. R. Brown, Ed. Elsevier Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 753–761.
• Manning, Christopher D. & Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/
• Mihalcea, Rada. 2007. Word sense disambiguation. Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. Springer-Verlag.
• Resnik, Philip and David Yarowsky. 2000. Distinguishing systems and distinguishing senses: New evaluation methods for word sense disambiguation, Natural Language Engineering, 5(2):113-133. http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~yarowsky/pubs/nle00.ps
• Yarowsky, David. 2001. Word sense disambiguation. Handbook of Natural Language Processing, ed. by Dale et al., 629-654. New York: Marcel Dekker.

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2007)

Prabodh Chandra Dey (born 1 May 1919),^[1] better known by his nickname Manna Dey (Bengali: মান্না দে), is a playback singer in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Kanada, Assamese films. Along with Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh he was a part of Indian film playback music industry. He is rated best classical singer among all singers of Hindi film music though he sang all types of songs from Pop to folk. He has recorded more than 3500 songs over the course of his career. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 1971, the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2007.^[2]

Biography[link]

Dey was born to Purna Chandra (father) and Mahamaya Dey (mother) on 1 May 1919. Besides his parents, his youngest paternal uncle Sangeetacharya (meaning "Venerable Teacher of Music" in Sanskrit), K. C. Dey highly inspired and influenced him. Dey received his early education in a small pre-primary school named Indu Babur Pathshala. Thereafter he attended Scottish Church Collegiate School and Scottish Church College,^[3] followed by Vidyasagar College where he received his graduate education.

During Dey’s years at Scottish Church College, he sang to entertain his classmates. He began taking singing lessons from his uncle, Krishna Chandra Dey and Ustad Dabir Khan. During this period, Manna Dey stood first for three consecutive years in three different categories of inter-collegiate singing competitions.

In 1942, Dey accompanied Krishna Chandra Dey on a visit to Bombay. There he started working as an assistant, first under Krishna Chandra Dey, and then under Sachin Dev Burman. Later he assisted other music composers and then started to work independently. While working independently as a music director for various Hindi movies, Manna Dey continued to take musical lessons in Hindustani classical music from Ustad Aman Ali Khan and Ustad Abdul Rahman Khan.

Dey started his career in playback singing with the movie, Tamanna, in 1943. The musical score was by Krishna Chandra Dey and Manna sang a duet with Suraiya. The song was an instant hit. He sang a solo composed by Sachin Dev Burman, Upar Gagan Vishal, in the 1950 movie, Mashal. Its lyrics were written by Kavi Pradeep. In 1952, Dey sang for a Bengali and a Marathi movie with the same name and storyline, Amar Bhupali. This established him as a leading playback singer.

Dey recorded popular duets With great Mohd. Rafi, Dey sang 58 duets like "Isq Isq" (Barsat ki raat) "Tu hai mera prem Devta (Kalpana), "Mama o mama" (Parvarish). With Lata Mangeshkar, Manna recorded 113 duets including Yeh raat bhigi bhigi,"Pyar hua iqrar hua", "Aja madhur sanam", "Ritu aye". With Asha Bhosle, Manna recorded more than 100 duets including "Re man sur me ga", "Tu chupi hai kahan", "Zindegi hai khel". Dey sang with singer/composer, Hemant Kumar (Hemanta Mukherjee), in Bengali movies, and also for some other Bengali composers like Nachiketa Ghosh and Sudhin Dasgupta. He sang a duet, "Ke Prothom Kachhe Esechi", with Lata Mangeshkar in the movie Sankhyabela. He also performed Rabindra Sangeet and has recorded over 3500 songs. In addition to film songs, Dey has released several albums of devotional songs of Jagadguru Shree Kripaluji Maharaj.^[4]

He was presented the Filmfare Life Time Achievement Award in 2011.

Personal life[link]

On 18 December 1953, Manna Dey married Sulochana Kumaran from Kerala They have two daughters: Shuroma, born on 19 October 1956; and Sumita, born on 20 June 1958. Manna's source of inspiration Sulochana died in Bangalore on 18 January 2012 on her birthday. She was suffering from cancer for long time. Manna Dey currently lives in Bangalore in the township of Kalyannagar after spending more than fifty years in Mumbai. He also maintains a Calcutta address. He still travels widely in the world to present musical programs.

His Bengali-language autobiography, Jiboner Jalsaghorey, has been published by the renowned Ananda Publisher in the year 2005 which has been translated in English as Memories Come Alive, in Hindi as Yaden Jee Uthi and in Marathi as Jiboner Jalsaghorey.

Jibaner Jalsaghore, a documentary on Dey's life, was released in 2008. Manna Dey Sangeet Academy is developing a complete archive on Manna Dey. In association with Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, the Manna Dey Music Archive has been developed in the Sangeet Bhawan.

He has also lent his voice for Madhushala, composed by Late Harivansh Rai Bachchan

Accolades and awards[link]

Dey has been honored with the titles Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan.

The following is the list of Manna Dey's other awards:

• 1969 National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer for the Hindi Film Mere Huzur
• 1971 National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer for the Bengali film Nishi Padma and Hindi film Mera Naam Joker
• 1971 Padma Shri Award by Government of India
• 1972 Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer for Mera Naam Joker
• 1985 Lata Mangeshkar Award awarded by Government of Madhya Pradesh
• 1988 Michale Sahittyo Puraskar awarded by Renaissance Sanskritik Parishad, Dhaka
• 1990 Shyamal Mitra Award by Mithun Fans Association
• 1991 Sangeet Swarnachurr Award awarded by Shree Khetra Kala Prakashika, Puri
• 1993 P.C.Chandra Award by P.C.Chandra Group & others
• 1999 Kamala Devi Roy Award by Kamala Devi Group
• 2001 Anandalok Lifetime Award by the Anandabazar Group
• 2002 Special Jury Swaralaya Yesudas Award for outstanding performance in music
• 2003 Alauddin Khan Award by the Government of West Bengal
• 2004 National Award as Playback singer by Government of Kerala
• 2004 Hony D. Lit Award by the Rabindra Bharati University
• 2005 Lifetime Achievement award by the Government of Maharashtra
• 2005 Padma Bhushan Award by the Government of India
• 2007 First AKSHAYA Award by Government of Orissa
• 2007 Awarded the Dada Saheb Phalke Award by the Government of India
• 2008 Hony D. Lit Award by Jadavpur University
• 2011 Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2011 Banga-Vibhushan by Government of West Bengal

Filmography[link]

References[link]

Tamanna (1942) Ramrajya (1943) Jwar Bhata (1944) Kavita (1944) Mahakavi Kalidas (1944) Vikramaditya (1945) Prabhu Ka Ghar (1946) Valmiki (1946) Geetgobind (1947) Awaara (1951) Do Bigha Zamin (1953)ff Hamdard (1953) Parineeta' '(1953) Chitrangada (1953) Boot Polish (1954) Shree 420 (1955) seema (1955) chori chori (1956) Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) Kabuliwala (1961) Dil Hi To Hai (1963 film)(1963) Chitralekha (1964) Waqt (1965) Love in Tokyo (1966) Teesri Kasam (1966) Pyar Kiye Ja (1966) Upkaar (1967) Raat Aur Din (1967) Aamne Samne (1967) Palki Nawab Sirajdoula) Boond Jo Ban Gaya Moti (1967) Padosan (1968) Mere Huzoor (1968) Neel Kamal (1968) Ram aur Rahim (1968) Ek Phool Do Mali (1969) Chanda Aur Bijli (1969) Jyoti (1969) Mera Naam Joker (1970) Anand (1970) Johar Mehmood in Hong Kong (1971) Jane Anjane (1971) Lal Patthar (1971) Buddha Mil Gaya (1971) Paraya Dhan (1971) Reshma Aur Shera (1971) Anubhav (1971) Chemmeen (Malayalam) Bawarchi (1972) Seeta Aur Geeta (1972) Shor (1972) Zindagi Zindagi (1972) Avishkaar (1973) Dil Ki Rahe (1973) Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973) Sampurna Ramayan (1973) Saudagar (1973) Zanjeer (1973) Bobby (1973) Resham ki Dori (1974) Us Paar (1974) Sholay (1975) Himalaya Se Ooncha (1975) Sanyasi (1975) Ponga Pandit (1975) Jai Santoshi Ma (1975) Das Mnambati (1976) Mehbooba (1976) Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) Anurodh (1977) Minoo (1977) Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki (1978) Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) Jurmana (1978) Abdullah (1980) Choro Ki Baraat Kranti Karz (1980) Laawaris (1981) Prahaar (1990) Guria (1997) Umar (2008)

External links[link]

• Manna Dey official website
• Manna Dey interview at 90 in Anandabazar Patrika
• Manna Dey's interview by Chandan Mitra
• Manna Dey's interview by Shekhar Gupta
• "Ai Mere Pyare Watan" Little India article
• "Being Manna Dey: The modest musical maestro" - IBNLive interview

Kate Bush
Kate Bush about to perform at Comic Relief 1986
Background information
Birth name	Catherine Bush
Born	(1958-07-30) 30 July 1958 (age 53) Bexleyheath, Southeast London, England
Genres	Art rock,[1] progressive rock,[2] alternative rock[1], baroque pop
Occupations	Musician, vocalist, songwriter, record producer
Instruments	Vocals, piano, keyboards, bass guitar, guitar, violin
Years active	1975–present
Labels	EMI Records (1975–present) Columbia Records (U.S.) (1989–2009) Legacy Recordings (2010–present) Fish People (division of EMI) 2011–
Website	Official website
Notable instruments
Fairlight CMI

Catherine "Kate" Bush (born 30 July 1958)^[1] is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.

In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written song.^[3] She has since released ten albums, three of which topped the UK Albums Chart, and has had 25 UK Top 40 hit singles including the Top 10 hits "Wuthering Heights", "Running Up that Hill", "King of the Mountain", "Babooshka", "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and "Don't Give Up".

In 1987, she won a Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist, and in 2002, her songwriting ability was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. During the course of her career, she has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards. After her 1979 tour – the only concert tour of her career – Bush released the 1980 album Never for Ever, which made her the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at Number 1.^[4] She is also the first (and to date only) female artist to have Top 5 albums in the UK charts in 5 successive decades.

In May 2012, Bush's latest album, 50 Words for Snow, won the South Bank Arts Award ^[5]. The album was also nominated for an Ivor Novello Award and a Brit Award that same year.

Early life[link]

Bush was born in Bexleyheath, Southeast London, to English physician Robert Bush and his Irish wife, Hannah Daly.^[6] She was raised in their farmhouse in East Wickham with her older brothers, John and Paddy.^[7] Bush came from an artistic background: her mother was a former Irish folk dancer, her father was an accomplished pianist, Paddy worked as a musical instrument maker and John was a poet and photographer. Both brothers were involved in the local folk music scene.^[8]

John was a karateka at Goldsmiths College karate club and Kate also trained there, becoming known as "Ee-ee" because of her squeaky kiai. One of the instructors, Dave Hazard, later noted in his autobiography that her dance moves seemed to owe something to karate.^[9]

Her family's musical influence inspired the young Kate to teach herself to play the piano at the age of 11. She also played the organ in a barn behind her parents' house and studied the violin.^[10] She soon began writing her own tunes and eventually added lyrics to them.^[11]

Career[link]

Bush attended St Joseph's Convent Grammar School (later the St Joseph's campus of Bexley College) and a Catholic girls' school on Woolwich Road in Abbey Wood, London, in the mid-1970s. During this time her family produced a demo tape with over 50 of her compositions, which was turned down by record labels. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd received the demo from Ricky Hopper, a mutual friend of Gilmour and the Bush family. Impressed with what he heard, Gilmour helped the sixteen-year-old Bush get a more professional-sounding demo tape recorded that would be more saleable to the record companies.^[12] Three tracks in total were recorded and paid for by Gilmour. ^[13]The tape was produced by Gilmour's friend Andrew Powell, who would go on to produce Bush's first two albums,^[11] and sound engineer Geoff Emerick.^[14] The tape was sent to EMI executive Terry Slater.^[15] Slater was impressed by the tape and signed her.^[16] The British record industry was reaching a point of stagnation.^[15] Progressive rock was very popular and visually oriented rock performers were growing in popularity, thus record labels looking for the next big thing were considering experimental acts.^[15]

Bush was put on retainer for two years by Bob Mercer, managing director of EMI group-repertoire division. According to Mercer he felt Bush's material was good enough to be released but felt that if the album failed it would be demoralising and if it was successful Bush was too young to handle it.^[17] For the first two years of her contract, Bush spent more time on school work than making an album. She left school after doing her mock A-levels and having gained ten GCE O-Level qualifications.^[18] In 2005, Bush stated in an interview with Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 2 that she believed EMI signed her before she was ready to make an album so that no other record company could offer her a contract. After the contract signing, EMI forwarded her a sizeable advance which she used to enrol in interpretive dance classes taught by Lindsay Kemp, a former teacher of David Bowie,^[19] and mime training with Adam Darius.^[20]

Bush also wrote and made demos of close to 200 songs, a few of which today can be found on bootleg recordings and are known as the Phoenix Recordings.^[21] From March to August 1977, she fronted the KT Bush Band at public houses around London – specifically at the Rose of Lee public house (now Dirty South) in Lewisham. The other three band members were Del Palmer (bass), Brian Bath (guitar), and Vic King (drums). She began recording her first album in August 1977,^[11] although two tracks had been recorded during the summer of 1975.

[edit] The Kick Inside and Lionheart

	Kate Bush "Wuthering Heights" (1978) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights".
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As part of her preparation for entering the studio, Bush toured pubs with the KT Bush Band. However, for her debut album The Kick Inside (1978) she was persuaded to use established session musicians, some of whom she would retain even after she had brought her bandmates back on board.^[22] Her brother Paddy played the harmonica and mandolin, unlike on later albums where he would play more exotic instruments such as the balalaika and didgeridoo. Stuart Elliott played some of the drums and would become her main percussionist on subsequent albums.^[23]

Bush released The Kick Inside when she was 19 years old, but some of the songs had been written when she was as young as 13. EMI originally wanted the more rock-oriented track "James and the Cold Gun" to be her debut single, but Bush insisted that it should be "Wuthering Heights". Even at this early stage of her career, she had gained a reputation for her determination to have a say in decisions affecting her work.^[11] "Wuthering Heights" topped the UK and Australian charts and became an international hit.^[24] Bush became the first woman to reach number one in the UK charts with a self-penned song.^[25] A second single, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", reached number six in the UK charts.^[26] It also made it onto the American Billboard Hot 100 where it reached number 85 in early 1979. Bob Mercer felt that Bush's relative lack of success in the United States compared to the rest of the world was due to her music being a poor fit for American radio formats and that there were no outlets for the visual presentation central to Bush's appeal.^[17] "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" went on to win her an Ivor Novello Award in 1979 for Outstanding British Lyric.^[27]

EMI capitalised on Bush's appearance by promoting the album with a poster of her in a tight pink top that emphasised her breasts. In an interview with NME magazine in 1982, Bush criticised the marketing technique, stating: "People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body."^[11] In late 1978, EMI persuaded Bush to quickly record a follow-up album, Lionheart, to take advantage of the success of The Kick Inside. Bush has often expressed dissatisfaction with Lionheart, feeling that she had needed more time to get it right. The album was produced by Andrew Powell, assisted by Bush. While it had spawned several hit singles, most notably "Wow", it did not garner the same reception as her first album, reaching number six in the UK album charts.^[28]

Bush was displeased with being rushed into making the second album. She set up her own publishing company, Kate Bush Music, and her own management company, Novercia, to maintain complete control over her work. Bush herself, along with members of her family, comprised the company's board of directors.^[11] Following the album's release, she was required by EMI to undertake heavy promotional work and an exhausting tour, the only one of her career.^[29] The tour, named The Tour of Life, began in April 1979 and lasted six weeks. This live show was co-devised and performed on stage with magician Simon Drake.^[30] Typical of her determination to have control, she was involved in every aspect of the show's production, choreography, set design, and staff recruitment.^[11] The shows were noted for her dancing, complex lighting and her 17 costume changes per show. Because of her intention to dance as she sang, her sound engineers used a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone to fashion the first headset mic to be used by a rock performer since the Swedish group Spotnicks used a very primitive version in the early 1960s.^[1][31]

[edit] Never for Ever and The Dreaming

	Kate Bush "Babooshka" (1980) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "Babooshka". Kate Bush "There Goes a Tenner" (1982) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "There Goes a Tenner".
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Released in September 1980, Never for Ever saw Bush's second foray into production, co-producing with Jon Kelly. Her first time as a producer was on her Live On Stage EP, released after her tour the previous year. The first two albums had resulted in a definitive sound evident in every track, with orchestral arrangements supporting the live band sound. The range of styles on Never for Ever is much more diverse, veering from the straightforward rocker "Violin" to the wistful waltz of hit single "Army Dreamers". Never for Ever was the first Kate Bush album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, in particular the Fairlight CMI, to which she was introduced when providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's eponymous third album in early 1980.^[11] It was her first record to reach the top position in the UK album charts, also making her the first female British artist to achieve that status,^[18] and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at the top.^[4] The top-selling single from the album was "Babooshka", which reached number five in the UK singles chart.^[32] In November 1980, she released the Christmas single "December Will Be Magic Again", which reached number 29 in the UK charts.

September 1982 saw the release of The Dreaming, the first album Bush produced by herself.^[33] It was also a major departure for Bush, being initially composed on the Fairlight CMI rather than piano, with songs extensively revised and rebuilt in the studio, rather than merely arranged there.^{[citation needed]} With her new-found freedom, she experimented with production techniques, creating an album that features a diverse blend of musical styles and is known for its near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight CMI. The Dreaming received a mixed critical reception in the UK at first. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created, and some critics accused the album of being over-produced.^{[citation needed]} In a 1993 interview with Q, Bush stated: "That was my 'She's gone mad' album."^[11] However, the album was hailed as a "masterpiece" and a "musical tour-de-force" by critics in America, and the album became her first to enter the US charts, albeit only reaching number 157.^[11] The album entered the UK album chart at number three, but is to date her lowest-selling album, garnering only a gold disc.

"Sat in Your Lap" was the first single from the album to be released. It pre-dated the album by over a year and peaked at number 11 in the UK.^[34] The album's title track, featuring the talents of Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, stalled at number 48, while the third single, "There Goes a Tenner", failed to chart, despite promotion from EMI and Bush. The track "Suspended in Gaffa" was released as a single in Europe, but not in the UK.

Continuing in her storytelling tradition, Bush looked far outside her own personal experience for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime films for "There Goes a Tenner", a documentary about the war in Vietnam for "Pull Out the Pin", and the plight of Indigenous Australians for "The Dreaming". "Houdini" is about the magician's death, and "Get Out Of My House" was inspired by Stephen King's novel The Shining.^[35]

[edit] Hounds of Love and The Whole Story

	Kate Bush "Running Up that Hill" (1985) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "Running Up that Hill".
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Hounds of Love was released in 1985. Because of the high cost of hiring studio space for her previous album, she built a private studio near her home, where she could work at her own pace.^[36] Hounds of Love ultimately topped the charts in the UK, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin from the number one position.^[37]

The album takes advantage of the vinyl format with two very different sides. The first side, Hounds of Love, contains five "accessible" pop songs, including the four singles "Running Up that Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky". In August 1985, NME featured Bush in a "Where Are They Now" article. "Running Up that Hill" reached number 3 in the UK charts and also re-introduced Bush to American listeners, climbing to number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1985. The second side of the album, The Ninth Wave, takes its name from Tennyson's poem, "Idylls of the King", about the legendary King Arthur's reign, and is one continuous piece of music.^[38] The album earned Bush nominations for Best Female Solo Artist, Best Album, Best Single, and Best Producer at the 1986 BRIT Awards. In the same year, Bush and Peter Gabriel had a UK top ten hit with "Don't Give Up" (Dolly Parton, Gabriel's original choice, turned his offer down),^[39] and EMI released her "greatest hits" album, The Whole Story. Bush provided a new lead vocal and refreshed backing track on "Wuthering Heights," and recorded a new single, "Experiment IV," for inclusion on the compilation. At the 1987 BRIT Awards, Bush won the award for Best Female Solo Artist.

[edit] The Sensual World and The Red Shoes

The increasingly personal tone of her writing continued on 1989's The Sensual World, with songs about unexpressed and unrequited love ("Love and Anger" and "Never Be Mine", respectively), and the pressures on modern relationships ("Between a Man and a Woman").^{[citation needed]} One of the quirkiest tracks on the album, touched by Bush's black humour, is "Heads We're Dancing", about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler.^[40] The title track drew its inspiration from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.^[40]

	Kate Bush "The Sensual World" (1989) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "The Sensual World".
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The Sensual World went on to become her biggest-selling album in the US, receiving an RIAA Gold certification four years after its release for 500,000 copies sold. In the United Kingdom album charts, it reached the number two position.^[41]

In 1990, the boxed-set This Woman's Work was released and included all of her albums with their original cover art, as well as two discs of all single B sides recorded from 1978–1990. In 1991, Bush released a cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which reached number 12 in the UK singles chart^[42], and went as high as number two in Australia, and in 2007, was voted the greatest cover ever by readers of The Observer newspaper.^[43] She recorded "Candle in the Wind", as the single's b-side.^[44]

The Red Shoes was released in November 1993. The Red Shoes features more high-profile cameo appearances than Bush's previous efforts, including contributions from composer and conductor Michael Kamen. Comedian Lenny Henry, Prince, Eric Clapton, Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, Trevor Whittaker, and Jeff Beck also contributed to the album. Both "The Sensual World" and "The Red Shoes" featured contributions from Trio Bulgarka, a trio of women who sang on several tracks, including "You're The One" and "Rocket's Tail." The album gave Bush her highest chart position in the US, reaching number 28, although the only song from the album to make the US singles chart was "Rubberband Girl", which peaked at number 88 in January 1994. In the UK, the album reached number two, and the singles "Rubberband Girl", "The Red Shoes", "Moments of Pleasure", and "And So Is Love" all reached the top 30.^[34][45] That same year, the short film The Line, the Cross & the Curve, written and directed by Bush, and starring Bush and English actress Miranda Richardson,^[46] used six of the songs on the album.

The initial plan had been to take the songs out on the road (though a new tour did not transpire), so Bush deliberately aimed for a live-band feel, with less of the studio trickery that had typified her last three albums and that would be difficult to recreate on stage.^[47] The result alienated some of her fan base, who enjoyed the intricacy of her earlier compositions,^[48] but others found a new complexity in the lyrics and the emotions they expressed.^[49]

This was a troubled time for Bush. She had suffered a series of bereavements, including the loss of guitarist Alan Murphy, who had started working with her on The Tour Of Life in 1979, and her mother Hannah, to whom she was exceptionally close.^[18] Many of the people she lost are honoured in the ballad "Moments of Pleasure". However, Bush's mother was still alive when "Moments of Pleasure" was written and recorded. Bush describes playing the song to her mother, who thought the line where she is quoted by Bush as saying "Every old sock meets an old shoe", was hilarious and "couldn't stop laughing".^[50]

[edit] Aerial

After the release of The Red Shoes, Bush dropped out of the public eye for many years, although her name occasionally cropped up in the media with rumours of a new album release. Bush had originally intended to take one year off but despite working on material 12 years would pass before her next album release.^[51] The press often viewed her as an eccentric recluse, sometimes drawing a comparison with Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.^[52] In reality, she was trying to give her young son a normal childhood, and needed a quiet place for her creative process to function.^[51] In 1998, Bush had given birth to Albert, known as "Bertie", fathered by her guitarist and now-husband Danny McIntosh.^[18][53] After living for many years on Court Road, Eltham, southeast London, the couple and their son moved away from the city and currently have two homes: a £2.5 million house in East Portlemouth on the Devon coast^[53] and a mansion on an islet on the Kennet and Avon canal at Sulhamstead in West Berkshire.^[54]

Bush's eighth studio album, Aerial, was released on double CD and vinyl in November 2005.^[18] The first single from the album was "King of the Mountain", which was played for the first time on BBC Radio 2 on 21 September 2005.^[55]

As on Hounds of Love (1985), the album is divided into two sections, each with its own theme and mood.^[56] The first disc, subtitled A Sea of Honey, features a set of unrelated themed songs, including "King of the Mountain"; "Bertie", a Renaissance-style ode to her son; and "Joanni", based on the story of Joan of Arc. In the song "π", Bush sings the number Pi to 115 decimal places.^[56][57] The second disc, subtitled A Sky of Honey, features one continuous piece of music describing the experience of being outdoors after waking at dawn, moving through afternoon, dusk, to night, then back to the following dawn of single summer's day. All the pieces in this suite refer or allude to sky and sea in their lyrical content. Bush mixed her voice with cooing wood pigeons to repeat the phrases "A sea of honey, a sky of honey," and "You're full of beauty" throughout the piece, and uses recordings of actual birdsong throughout. A Sky of Honey features Rolf Harris playing the didgeridoo on one track, and providing vocals on "The Painter's Link".^[56] Other artists making guest appearances on the album include Peter Erskine, Eberhard Weber, Lol Creme, and Gary Brooker. Two tracks feature string arrangements by Michael Kamen, performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra. A CD release of the single "King of the Mountain" included a cover of "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye.^[58]

	Kate Bush "King of the Mountain" (2005) noicon Sample from Kate Bush's "King of the Mountain".
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"King of the Mountain" entered the UK Downloads Chart at number six on 17 October 2005,^[59] and by 30 October it had become Bush's third-highest-charting single ever in the UK, peaking at number four on the full chart. Aerial entered the UK albums chart at number 3,^[60] and the US chart at number 48.^[61] Bush herself carried out relatively little publicity for the album, only conducting a handful of magazine and radio interviews. Aerial earned Bush two nominations at the 2006 BRIT Awards, for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Album.^[62]

In late 2007, Bush composed and recorded a new song, "Lyra", for the soundtrack to the fantasy film The Golden Compass.^[63]

[edit] Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow

On 16 May 2011, Bush released the album Director's Cut. The album, which Bush has described as an entirely new project rather than a collection of mere remixes, contains 11 tracks of substantially reworked material from her earlier albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, all of which have been recorded using analogue, rather than digital, equipment to create "a warmer sound". All the tracks have new lead vocals, new drums, and radically reworked instrumentation. Some of them have been transposed to a lower key to accommodate her lowering voice. Three of the songs, including "This Woman's Work", have been completely re-recorded, with lyrics often changed in places.^[64] The album has been met with a wide range of reviews with most reviewers a bit confused about the concept of the album itself, while responding with varying degrees of enthusiasm about its revamped tracks. Of particular note is the warmer, more intimate tone of the songs and the richer, more mature sound of her voice.^[65][66] This is the first album on her new label, Fish People, a division of EMI Records, with whom she's had a relationship since she started recording. In addition to the album Director's Cut in both its single CD form and in a box-set with The Sensual World and the analogue re-mastered The Red Shoes, Fish People will be releasing re-mastered editions of The Hounds of Love and The Dreaming.^[67] The album debuted at number 2 on the United Kingdom chart.^[68]

The song "The Sensual World" has been renamed "Flower of the Mountain" and contains a passage of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy from James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Bush said, "Originally when I wrote the song "The Sensual World", I had used text from the end of Ulysses. When I asked for permission to use the text I was refused, which was disappointing. I then wrote my own lyrics for the song, although I felt that the original idea had been more interesting. Well, I'm not James Joyce am I? When I came to work on this project I thought I would ask for permission again and this time they said yes."^[69]

The first single released from the album was "Deeper Understanding" and contains a new chorus featuring computerised vocals from Bush's son, Albert. A video for the song, directed by Bush, has been released through her channel on YouTube. It features Robbie Coltrane as a man consumed by his relationship with his computer (voiced by Bush's son). Frances Barber plays the man's wife, and Noel Fielding also appears.

Bush's next studio album, 50 Words for Snow, was released on 21 November 2011. The album contains seven new songs "set against a backdrop of falling snow," with a total running time of 65 minutes.^[70][71] A radio edit of the first single, "Wild Man," was played on BBC Radio 2's 'Ken Bruce' show on 10 October.^[72] and was released as a digital download on 11 October.^[73] The album will be distributed in the United States by Anti-Records.

On 14 November 2011, NPR played 50 Words for Snow in its entirety for the first time.^[74] Australia's ABC Radio National declared 50 Words for Snow album of the week of 12 November 2011.^[75]

The album's songs are built around Bush's quietly jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums, and utilise both sung and spoken word vocals in what Classic Rock's Stephen Dalton calls "a...supple and experimental affair, with a comtemporary chamber pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics...billowing jazz-rock soundscapes, interwoven with fragmentary narratives delivered in a range of voices from shrill to Laurie Anderson-style cooing."^[76] Bassist Danny Thompson appears on the album, which also features performances by Elton John and actor Stephen Fry.

On the first track, "Snowflake," in a song written specifically to use his still high choir-boy voice,^[77] Bush's son Albert (Bertie) sings the role of a falling snowflake in a song expressing the hope of a noisy world soon being hushed by snowfall. "Snowflake" drifts into "Lake Tahoe", where choral singer Stefan Roberts and Bush sing about a rarely seen ghost: a woman who appears in a Victorian gown to call to her dog, Snowflake. Bush explained to fellow musician Jamie Cullum in an interview on Dutch Radio^[78] that she wished to explore using high male voices in contrast to her own, deeper, voice. "Misty" is about a snowman lover who melts away after a night of passion, while "Wild Man" tells the story of a group of climbers in the Himalayas who, upon finding evidence of a nearby Yeti, erase all traces of it to protect it from discovery. Elton John and Bush as eternally divided lovers trade vocals on "Snowed In at Wheeler Street", while Stephen Fry recites the "50 Words for Snow". The quiet "Among Angels" finishes the album.^[79]

50 Words For Snow received general acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 26 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim".^[80] She was nominated for a Brit Award in the "Best Female Artist" category^[81], and the album was nominated in 2012 in the Best Album category of both the South Bank Arts and Ivor Novello Awards.^[82]

On 1 May 2012, Bush won the South Bank Arts Award.^[5]

Musical style[link]

Bush's music is eclectic, using various styles of music even within the same album. Her songs have spanned genres as diverse as rock, pop, alternative and art rock.^[1] Even in her earliest works where the piano was a primary instrument, she wove together many diverse influences, melding classical music, rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources, and this has continued throughout her career.

In an interview with Melody Maker magazine in 1977, she revealed that male artists had more influence on her work than females, stating: "Every female you see at a piano is either Lynsey De Paul, or Carole King. And most male music—not all of it but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall and that's what I like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. Not many females succeed with that."^[11]

The experimental nature of her music has led it to be described as a later, more technological, and more accessible manifestation of the British progressive rock movement.^[2][15] Southern England was the home to the most influential and successful acts of the progressive rock movement and,^[2] like other artists in this genre, Bush rejects the classic American style of making pop music, which was adopted by most UK pop artists. Bush's vocals contain elements of British, Anglo-Irish and most prominently (southern) English accents and, in its utilisation of musical instruments from many periods and cultures, her music has differed from American pop norms.^[2] Elements of Bush's lyrics tend to be more unusual and less clichéd than American-style pop lyrics, often employing historical or literary references and avoiding autobiographical lyrics. She considers herself a storyteller who embodies the character singing the song and strenuously rejects efforts by others to insist that her songs are autobiographical.^[2][83][84]

Reviewers have used the term "surreal" to describe her music.^[85] Many of her songs have a melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorisation.^[86] It has been observed that even the more joyous pieces are often tinged with traces of melancholy, and even the most sorrowful pieces have elements of vitality struggling against all that would oppress them.^[87]

Bush is not afraid to tackle sensitive and taboo subjects.^[88] "The Kick Inside" is based on a traditional English folk song (The Ballad of Lucy Wan) about an incestuous pregnancy and a resulting suicide.^[89] "Kashka from Baghdad" is a song about a homosexual male couple;^[90] Out magazine listed two of her albums in their Top 100 Greatest Gayest albums list.^[91][92] "The Infant Kiss" is a song about a haunted, unstable woman's almost paedophile infatuation with a young boy in her care (inspired by Jack Clayton's film The Innocents (1961), which had been based on Henry James's famous novella The Turn of the Screw);^[93] and "Breathing" explores the results of nuclear fallout from the perspective of an unborn child in the womb.^[94] Her lyrics have referenced a wide array of subject matter, often relatively obscure, as in "Cloudbusting", which was inspired by Peter Reich's autobiography, "Book of Dreams", about his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Reich, and G. I. Gurdjieff in "Them Heavy People", while "Deeper Understanding", from The Sensual World, portrays a person who stays indoors, obsessively talking to a computer and shunning human contact.

Comedy is also a big influence on her and is a significant component of her work. She has cited Woody Allen,^[95] Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and The Young Ones^[96] as particular favourites. Horror movies are another interest of Bush's and have influenced the gothic nature of several of her songs, such as "Hounds of Love", inspired by the 1957 horror movie Night of the Demon.^[97] Her songs have occasionally combined comedy and horror to form dark humour, such as murder by poisoning in "Coffee Homeground", an alcoholic mother in "Ran Tan Waltz" and the upbeat "The Wedding List", a song inspired by François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black about the death of a groom and the bride's subsequent revenge against the killer.^[98]

Length of time between albums and perception of perfectionism[link]

The length of time in between album releases has led to rumours in the media concerning her health or appearance.^[96] In the past, stories of weight gain or mental instability have been disproved by Bush's periodic reappearance.^[99] In 2011 Bush told BBC Radio 4 that the amount of time between album releases is extremely stressful noting: "It's very frustrating the albums take as long as they do...I wish there weren't such big gaps between them." In the same interview Bush denied she was a perfectionist in the studio, saying: "I think it's important that things are flawed...That's what makes a piece of art interesting sometimes – the bit that's wrong or the mistake you've made that's led onto an idea you wouldn't have had otherwise," and reiterated her prioritisation of her family life.^[83]

Live performances[link]

Bush's only tour took place 2 April – 13 May 1979, after which she gave only the occasional live performance. Several reasons have been suggested as to why she abandoned touring, among them her reputed need to be in total control of the final product, which is incompatible with live stage performance, a rumour of a crippling fear of flying,^[100] and the suggestion that the death of 21-year-old Bill Duffield severely affected her. Duffield, her lighting director, was killed in an accident during her 2 April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. Bush held a benefit concert on 12 May 1979, with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley at London's Hammersmith Odeon for his family. Duffield would be honoured in two later songs: "Blow Away" on Never for Ever and "Moments of Pleasure" on The Red Shoes. Bush explained in a BBC Radio 2 interview with Mark Radcliffe that she actually enjoyed the tour but was consumed with producing her subsequent records. A BBC film crew followed the preparation for the tour which was shown on the BBC Nationwide program as a 30 minute special.

During the same period as her tour, she made numerous television appearances around the world, including Top of the Pops in the United Kingdom, Bios Bahnhof in Germany, and Saturday Night Live in the United States (with Paul Shaffer on piano).^[101] On 28 December 1979, BBC TV aired the Kate Bush Christmas Special. It was recorded in October 1979 at the BBC Studios in Birmingham, England; choreography by Anthony Van Laast.^[102] As well as playing songs from her first two albums, she played "December Will Be Magic Again", and "Violin" from her forthcoming album, Never for Ever. Peter Gabriel made a guest appearance to play "Here Comes the Flood", and a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day" with Bush.^[103]

After the Tour of Life Bush desired to make two more albums before touring again. At that point she got involved with production techniques and sound experimentation that took up a lot of time and prevented her from touring. Later on there were a couple of instances where she came close to touring again.^[104]

In 1982, Bush participated in the first benefit concert in aid of The Prince's Trust alongside artists such as Madness, Midge Ure, Phil Collins, Mick Karn and Pete Townshend. On 25 April 1986 Bush performed live for British charity event Comic Relief, singing "Do Bears... ?", a humorous duet with Rowan Atkinson, and a rendition of "Breathing". Later in the year on 28 June 1986, she made a guest appearance to duet with Peter Gabriel on "Don't Give Up" at Earl's Court, London as part of his "So" tour. In March 1987, Bush sang "Running Up that Hill" at The Secret Policeman's Third Ball.

On 17 January 2002, Bush appeared with her long-time champion, David Gilmour, singing the part of the doctor in "Comfortably Numb" at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

In 2011 Bush told Classic Rock Magazine "I do hope that some time I get a chance to do some shows. Maybe not a tour, but something"^[104]

Video projects[link]

In 1979 Bush's one live show, The Tour of Life, was recorded for the BBC and for release on VHS as Kate Bush Live at Hammersmith Odeon.^[105]

Bush has appeared in innovative music videos designed to accompany her singles releases. Among the best known are those for "Running Up that Hill", "Babooshka", "Breathing", "Wuthering Heights", and "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and "Cloudbusting", featuring actor Donald Sutherland, who made time during the filming of another project to take part in the video.^[106] EMI has released collections of her videos, including The Single File, Hair of the Hound, The Whole Story, a career video overview released in conjunction with the 1986 compilation album of the same title,^[105] and The Sensual World.

In 1993, she directed and starred in the short film, The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a musical co-starring Miranda Richardson, featuring music from Bush's album The Red Shoes, which was inspired by the classic movie of the same name. It was released on VHS in the UK in 1994 and also received a small number of cinema screenings around the world. In recent interviews, Bush has said that she considers it a failure, and stated in 2001: "I'm very pleased with four minutes of it, but I'm very disappointed with the rest."^[107] In a 2005 interview, she described the film as "A load of bollocks."^[108]

In 1994, Bush provided the music used in a series of psychedelic-themed television commercials for the soft drink Fruitopia that appeared in the United States. The same company aired the ads in the United Kingdom, but the British version featured Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins instead of Bush.^[109]

In late 2006, a DVD documentary titled Kate Bush Under Review was released by Sexy Intellectual, which included archival interviews with Bush, along with interviews with a selection of music historians and journalists (including Phil Sutcliffe, Nigel Williamson, and Morris Pert). The DVD also includes clips from several of Bush's music videos.^[110]

On 2 December 2008, the DVD collection of the fourth season of Saturday Night Live, including her performances, was released.^[111] A three DVD set of The Secret Policeman's Balls benefit concerts that includes Bush's performance was released on 27 January 2009.^[112].

Bush has released four short videos for the album 50 Words for Snow. One is an advertisement for the album. Two stop-motion "Animation Segments" were posted on the Kate Bush Official website and YouTube, one to accompany a 2 minute 25 second section of "Misty", called "Mistraldespair", the other to accompany a 2 minute 33 second section of "Wild Man". "Mistraldespair" was directed by Bush and animated by Gary Pureton,^[113] while the "Wild Man" segment was created by Finn and Patrick at Brandt Animation.^[114] On 24 January 2012, a third piece called "Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe", was premiered on her website and on YouTube. Running at 5:01, the piece is a sepia tone shadow puppet animation. Directed by Bush and photographed by award-winning British cinematographer Roger Pratt, the shadow puppets were designed by Robert Allsopp.^[115] Bush stated that "Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe" is intended to be a "self contained piece" separate from the song "Lake Tahoe".^[116]

Movie projects[link]

In 1990, Bush starred in the black comedy film Les Dogs, produced by The Comic Strip for BBC television. Aired on 8 March 1990, Bush plays the bride Angela at a wedding set in a post-apocalyptic version of Britain. While Bush's is a silent presence in a wedding dress throughout most of the film, she does have several lines of dialogue with Peter Richardson in two dream sequences. In another Comic Strip Presents film, GLC, she produced the theme song "Ken", which includes a vocal performance by Bush. The song was written about Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council, who would later be elected as mayor of London and at the time was working with musicians to help the Labour Party garner the youth vote.^[117]

She also produced all the incidental music, which is synthesiser based. Bush wrote and performed the song "The Magician", in a fairground-like arrangement, for Menahem Golan's 1979 film The Magician of Lublin.^[118] In 1985, Bush contributed a darkly melancholic version of the Ary Barroso song "Brazil" to the soundtrack of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. The track was scored and arranged by Michael Kamen. In 1986, she wrote and recorded "Be Kind To My Mistakes" for the Nicolas Roeg film Castaway. An edited version of this track was used as the B side to her 1989 single "This Woman's Work". In 1988, the song "This Woman's Work" was featured in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby, and a slightly remixed version appeared on Bush's album The Sensual World.^[119] The song has since appeared on numerous television shows, and in 2005 reached number eight on the UK download chart after featuring in a British television advertisement for the charity NSPCC.^[120]

In 1999, Bush wrote and recorded a song for the Disney film Dinosaur, but the track was ultimately not included on the soundtrack. According to the winter 1999 issue of HomeGround, a Bush fanzine, it was scrapped when Disney asked her to rewrite the song and she refused. Also in 1999, Bush's song "The Sensual World" was featured prominently in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's film "Felicia's Journey".^[121] "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" is on the soundtrack for the 2007 British romantic comedy film Starter for 10.^[122]

In 2007, Bush was asked to write a song for The Golden Compass soundtrack which made reference to the lead character, Lyra Belacqua. The song, "Lyra", was used in the closing credits of the film, reached number 187 in the UK Singles Chart^[123] and was nominated for the International Press Academy's Satellite Award for original song in a motion picture.^[124][125]

According to Del Palmer, Bush was asked to compose the song on very short notice and the whole project was completed in 10 days.^[126] The song was produced and recorded by Bush in her own studio, and features the Magdalen College, Oxford choir.

Collaborations[link]

Bush provided vocals on two of Peter Gabriel's albums, including the hits "Games Without Frontiers" and "Don't Give Up", as well as "No Self-Control". Gabriel appeared on Bush's 1979 television special, where they sang a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day". She has sung on two Roy Harper tracks, "You", on his 1979 album, "The Unknown Soldier", and "Once", the title track of his 1990 album. She has also sung on the title song of the 1986 Big Country album The Seer, the Midge Ure song "Sister and Brother" from his 1988 album Answers to Nothing, Go West's 1987 single "The King Is Dead" and two songs with Prince – "Why Should I Love You?", from her 1993 album The Red Shoes, and in 1996, the song "My Computer" from Prince's album Emancipation. In 1987, she sang a verse on the charity single "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid. She sang a line on the charity single "Spirit of the Forest" by Spirit of the Forest in 1989. 1990 saw Kate producing, for the only time in her career, one song for another artist, Alan Stivell's "Kimiad", on his album Again. Stivell had appeared on The Sensual World. In 1995, Bush covered George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" for the tribute album The Glory of Gershwin. In 1996, Bush contributed a version of "Mná na hÉireann" (Irish for Women of Ireland) for the Anglo-Irish folk-rock compilation project Common Ground: The Voices of Modern Irish Music. Bush had to sing the song in Irish, which she learned to do phonetically.^[127] Artists who have contributed to Bush's own albums include Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Gary Brooker, and Prince. Bush provided backing vocals for a song that was recorded during the 1990s titled Wouldn't Change a Thing by Lionel Azulay, the drummer with the original band that was later to become the KT Bush Band. The song, which was engineered and produced by Del Palmer, is available for download and will be on Azulay’s upcoming CD.^[128][129]

Bush declined a request by Erasure to produce one of their albums because "she didn’t feel that that was her area".^[130]

In 2010, Bush provided vocals for Rolf Harris's cover of the traditional Irish song "She Moves Through the Fair". Harris, who described the collaboration the "best thing I’ve done," is unsure of how to release the track.^[131]

Bush's most recent collaborations, including duets with Elton John and Stephen Fry, took place on her 2012 album, 50 Words for Snow.

Reluctance to tour[link]

Kate has always been reluctant to tour and has always cited the reason is she finds it exhausting. She has said by the time she's completed the album, videos and promotional work "there's nothing left of me". ^[13] She said it would be impossible for her to tour the way she works.

She did do some shows in 1979 and the one at the Hammersmith Odeon was released on video. She said she "really enjoyed it" and that it was a "tremendous, fabulous experience". However, she also found it "incredibly exhausting and a total commitment. I don't think people understand the level of involvement I get into when I do a project."^[13]

The Hammersmith video shows an elaborate set complete with mime, magicians and theatrics.

Upon the release of The Director's Cut, she said she wouldn't rule out the possibility of shows in the future: "Maybe I will do some shows some day. I'd like to think so, before I get too ancient - turn up with my Zimmer frame."^[132]

Influence[link]

From the 1980s onward, it has become almost standard for individualistic female singer-songwriters to be compared to Bush by the media. She has been noted as an influence on female artists such as Tori Amos, Björk,^[133] Alison Goldfrapp,^[134][135] Nerina Pallot,^[136] KT Tunstall,^[137] Happy Rhodes,^[138] Lily Allen,^[139] PJ Harvey,^[36][140] Little Boots,^{[141][142][143]} and Florence Welch,^[144][145] in addition to acts as diverse as Muse,^[137] OutKast,^[140] and Bloc Party.^[146] Paula Cole named Bush as an influence while accepting the Best New Artist Grammy in 1996. Ariel Pink wrote a tribute song for her titled "For Kate I Wait" on the album The Doldrums. The trip-hop artist Tricky has said about Bush, "I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible".^[18] Punk rocker John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief",^[147] "fucking brilliant" and labelled her "a true original". Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected. Rotten theorised that Bush thought the song contained insulting references aimed at her.^[148][149] Marc Almond chose "Moments of Pleasure" as one of his 10 favourite songs on Radio 2 in June 2007, saying that the song had a profound influence on him when he was combating drug addiction in New York in the 1990s. In November 2006, the singer Rufus Wainwright named Bush as one of his top ten gay icons.^[150] Outside music, Bush has been an inspiration to several fashion designers, most notably Hussein Chalayan.^[151]

Many artists around the world have recorded cover versions of Bush songs, including Charlotte Church, The Futureheads (who had a UK top ten hit with a cover of "Hounds of Love"), Placebo (whose cover of "Running Up that Hill" has featured in many TV series and films), Pat Benatar, Faith and the Muse, Hayley Westenra, Jane Birkin, Natalie Cole, Ra Ra Riot,^[152][153] Maxwell,^[154] The Church^[155] and Nada Surf.^[156] The British dance act Utah Saints sampled a line from "Cloudbusting" for their single, "Something Good". Artists such as Tori Amos, Nolwenn Leroy, Patrick Wolf and Happy Rhodes (whose upper vocal range has been compared with the one of Kate Bush)^[157] have covered her songs in live performances. Coldplay said their track "Speed of Sound" was originally an attempt to re-create "Running Up that Hill". Suede front-man Brett Anderson has stated that "Wuthering Heights" was the first single he ever bought and mentioned "And Dream of Sheep" in Suede's song "These are the Sad Songs".^[158] British folk singer Jim Moray also references "And Dream of Sheep" in his self-penned track "Longing for Lucy".^[159] Progressive death metal act Novembre also covered "Cloudbusting" on their album Novembrine Waltz. In 2009, John Forté released a hip hop version of "Running Up that Hill".^[160]

In 2010, composer and vocalist Theo Bleckmann released an album of Kate Bush covers, titled Hello Earth! – The Music of Kate Bush which includes his interpretation of fourteen Bush classics,^[161] which he also performs live around the world. In an interview with Hungarian online music magazine Kortár's Blog, Bleckmann explained his choice to explore Bush's work: "The music of Kate Bush has been a saviour throughout my teenage years when I lived in a small town in Germany...To come back to her music fresh...and to discover more depths and beauty in it, became an overwhelming confirmation of the endurance of great music regardless of genre and time."^[162][163]

Personal life[link]

Kate Bush is married to guitarist Dan McIntosh and the couple have a son, Albert.^[164] She resides in Devon and until late-2011 had another residence near Theale, West Berkshire.

Discography[link]

• The Kick Inside (1978)
• Lionheart (1978)
• Never for Ever (1980)
• The Dreaming (1982)
• Hounds of Love (1985)
• The Sensual World (1989)
• The Red Shoes (1993)
• Aerial (2005)
• Director's Cut (2011)
• 50 Words for Snow (2011)

See also[link]

• List of Kate Bush awards

References[link]