Ambiguity Resolution : An Analytical Study

Abstract

Natural language processing (NLP) is very much needed in today’s world to enhance human-machine interaction. It is an important concern to process textual data and obtain useful and meaningful information from these texts. NLP parses the texts and provides information to machine for further processing. The present status of NLP’s computational process of identifying the meaning (sense) of a word in a particular context is ambiguous, where the meaning of word in the context is not clear and may point to multiple senses. Ambiguity in understanding correct meaning of texts is hampering the growth and development in various fields of Natural language processing applications like Machine translation, Human Machine interface etc. The process of finding the correct meaning of the ambiguous texts in the given context is called as word sense disambiguation (WSD). WSD is perceived as one of the most challenging problem in the Natural language processing community and is still unsolved. It is evident that different ambiguities exist in natural languages and researchers are contributing to resolve the problem in different languages for successful disambiguation. These ambiguities must be resolved in order to understand the meaning of the text and help to boost NLP processing and applications. Objective is to investigate how WSD can be used to alleviate ambiguities, automatically determine the correct meaning of the ambiguous text and help to boost NLP processing and applications. Resolving ambiguity for translation involves working with various natural language processing techniques to investigate the structure of the languages, availability of lexical resources etc. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) in the field of computing linguistics is an area which is still unsolved. This paper focus on the in-depth analysis of such ambiguity, issues in Language Translation, how WSD resolves the ambiguity and contribute towards building a framework.