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What is word sense disambiguation good for?

Adam Kilgarriff
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Abstract

Word sense disambiguation has developed as a sub-area of natural language processing, as if, like parsing, it was a well-defined task which was a pre-requisite to a wide range of language-understanding applications. First, I review earlier work which shows that a set of senses for a word is only ever defined relative to a particular human purpose, and that a view of word senses as part of the linguistic furniture lacks theoretical underpinnings. Then, I investigate whether and how word sense ambiguity is in fact a problem for different varieties of NLP application.

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Adam Kilgarriff. 1997-12-23. What is word sense disambiguation good for?. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9712008

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