Chapter 11: WSD in NLP Applications

Philip Resnik

Abstract

When is word sense disambiguation useful in practice? This chapter considers applications of word sense disambiguation in language technology, looking at established and emerging applications and at more and less traditional conceptions of the task.

Links

Biomedical WSD test collection

Contents

11.1 Introduction. 299

11.2 Why WSD?. 300

Argument from faith. 300

Argument by analogy. 301

Argument from specific applications. 302

11.3 Traditional WSD in applications. 303

11.3.1 WSD in traditional information retrieval 304

11.3.2 WSD in applications related to information retrieval 307

Cross-language IR.. 308

Question answering. 309

Document classification. 312

11.3.3 WSD in traditional machine translation. 313

11.3.4 Sense ambiguity in statistical machine translation. 315

11.3.5 Other emerging applications. 317

11.4 Alternative conceptions of word sense. 320

11.4.1 Richer linguistic representations. 320

11.4.2 Patterns of usage. 321

11.4.3 Cross-language relationships. 323

11.5 Conclusions. 325

Acknowledgments. 325

References. 326