Approaches for Word Sense Disambiguation - A Survey

Abstract

Word sense disambiguation is a technique in the field of natural language processing where the main task is to find the correct sense in which a word occurs in a particular context. It is found to be of vital help to applications such as question answering, machine translation, text summarization, text classification, information retrieval etc. This has resulted in excessive interest in approaches based on machine learning which performs classification of word senses automatically. The main motivation behind word sense disambiguation is to allow the users to make ample use of the available technologies because ambiguities present in any language provide great difficulty in the use of information technology as words in human language that occur in a particular context can be interpreted in more than one way depending on the context. In this paper we put forward a survey of supervised, unsupervised and knowledge based approaches and algorithms available in word sense disambiguation (WSD).