Word-sense disambiguation

What is WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION? What does WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION mean?

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What is WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION? What does WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION mean? WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION meaning - WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION definition - WORD-SENSE DISAMBIGUATION explanation. Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license. In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open problem of natural language processing and ontology. WSD is identifying which sense of a word (i.e. meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings. The solution to this problem impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, inference et cetera. The human brain is quite proficient at word-sense disambiguation. The fact that natural language is formed in a way that requires so much of it is a reflection of that neurologic reality. In other words, human language developed in a way that reflects (and also has helped to shape) the innate ability provided by the brain's neural networks. In computer science and the information technology that it enables, it has been a long-term challenge to develop the ability in computers to do natural language processing and machine learning. To date, 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. Accuracy of current algorithms 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. Disambiguation requires two strict inputs: 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)".