Difference between revisions of "Word-sense disambiguation"

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To a human, the meaning is obvious, but Bar-Hillel claimed that without a "universal encyclopaedia" a machine would never be able to deal with this problem. Figuring out which sense to use when a word is ambiguous is called ''word sense disambiguation'', and is a big research area.
To a human, the meaning is obvious, but Bar-Hillel claimed that without a "universal encyclopaedia" a machine would never be able to deal with this problem. Figuring out which sense to use when a word is ambiguous is called ''word sense disambiguation'', and is a big research area.


* [[Lexical selection]]
==Lextor==
{{main|Lextor}}


Lextor is the current word sense disambiguation module for Apertium, it works using statistics and requires 1) slightly pre-processed dictionaries and 2) corpora to train the module. '''The module is turned off in most cases as it does not provide an improvement over the baseline.'''

==See also==

* [[Lexical selection in target language]]
* [[Limited rule-based lexical selection]]


==Further reading==
==Further reading==

Revision as of 09:44, 7 September 2012

Word sense disambiguation is important in machine translation between less-closely related languages. The problem was elucidated most famously by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who asks us to consider the following sentence:

Little John was looking for his toy box. Finally he found it. The box was in the pen.

The word pen may have two meanings:

  1. Something you use to write with
  2. A container of some kind

To a human, the meaning is obvious, but Bar-Hillel claimed that without a "universal encyclopaedia" a machine would never be able to deal with this problem. Figuring out which sense to use when a word is ambiguous is called word sense disambiguation, and is a big research area.


Further reading