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Introduction

  • Chapter
Word Sense Disambiguation

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 33))

Anyone who gets the joke when they hear a pun will realize that lexical ambiguity is a fundamental characteristic of language: Words can have more than one distinct meaning. So why is it that text doesn’t seem like one long string of puns? After all, lexical ambiguity is pervasive. The 121 most frequent English nouns, which account for about one in five word occurrences in real text, have on average 7.8 meanings each (in the Princeton WordNet (Miller 1990), tabulated by Ng and Lee (1996)). But the potential for ambiguous readings tends to go completely unnoticed in normal text and flowing conversation. The effect is so strong that some people will even miss a pun (a real ambiguity) obvious to others. Words may be polysemous in principle, but in actual text there is very little real ambiguity – to a person.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of the Basque Country, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, E-20018, Donostia, Basque Country, Spain

    Associate Professor Eneko Agirre

  2. Sharp Laboratories of Europe Limited, Oxford Science Park, OX4 4GB, Oxford, UK

    Research Scientist Philip Edmonds

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  1. Associate Professor Eneko Agirre
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  2. Research Scientist Philip Edmonds
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of the Basque Country, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, E-20018, Donostia, Basque Country, Spain

    Eneko Agirre

  2. Sharp Laboratories of Europe Limited, Oxford Science Park, OX4 4GB, Oxford, UK

    Philip Edmonds

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Agirre, E., Edmonds, P. (2007). Introduction. In: Agirre, E., Edmonds, P. (eds) Word Sense Disambiguation. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4809-8_1

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