Abstract

Lexical ambiguity is a pervasive problem in natural language processing. However, little quantitative information is available about the extent of the problem, or about the impact that it has on information retrieval systems. We report on an analysis of lexical ambiguity in information retrieval test collections, and on experiments to determine the utility of word meanings for separating relevant from non-relevant documents. The experiments show that there is considerable ambiguity even in a specialized database. Word senses

Citations