Word sense disambiguation(WSD) is semantic disambiguation at the word level. It is an open problem in natural language processing and ontology. Ambiguity and disambiguation are the core issues in natural language understanding. At the word meaning, sentence meaning, and paragraph meaning levels, there will be different semantics of the language depending on the context. Disambiguation refers to the process of determining the semantics of an object based on the context.

Semantic disambiguation/word sense disambiguation is a core and difficult point in natural language processing tasks, affecting the performance of almost all tasks, such as search engines, opinion mining, text understanding and generation, reasoning, etc.

The meaning of word sense disambiguation

In the long-term development of linguistics, language itself has accumulated many polysemous usages. The emergence of language is the result of the joint action of many aspects. The use of language is constantly changing. A word has many specific meanings in development, and there are still some common meanings now. Different regions may have different usages for a word, different industries may have different interpretations for a word, and even different groups, different individuals, and different tones may have their own special interpretations.

Semantic disambiguation is a way of language understanding. On the one hand, we need to understand the meaning and application of polysemy of common words. On the other hand, we also need to consider specific scenarios and use relevant knowledge bases and corpus training to improve the performance of polysemy.

References

【1】https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word Sense Disambiguation