Word Sense Disambiguation
Lymba's word sense disambiguation (WSD) tool automatically assigns the correct meaning, or sense, to a polysemous word by analyzing the context of the word in a sentence or a document. A polysemous word is one that has multiple meanings within the same part of speech. A typical example is the word "bank," which has the following definitions in WordNet:
S: (n) depository financial institution, bank, banking concern, banking company (a financial institution that accepts deposits and channels the money into lending activities) "he cashed a check at the bank"; "that bank holds the mortgage on my home"
S: (n) bank (sloping land (especially the slope beside a body of water)) "they pulled the canoe up on the bank"; "he sat on the bank of the river and watched the currents"
S: (n) bank (a supply or stock held in reserve for future use (especially in emergencies))
Lymba's WSD tool determines which sense of "bank" is being used in its given document context. This process is an essential component to lexical chains and any other tools whose goal is to measure the similarity of one passage of text to another, or to detect the topic of a passage of text.
For more information on word sense disambiguation please refer to:Novischi, A.; Moldovan, D.; Parker, P.; Badulescu, A.; Hauser, B. "LCC's WSD systems for Senseval-3", Proceedings of SENSEVAL3, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004.