Re: Errors caused by word sense ambiguity

Robert A Amsler (amsler@bellcore.com)
Wed, 26 Apr 1995 15:45:13 -0400

The arbitrary distinction between word class and word sense seems
to me to already separate this problem from "real world applications".
The largest set of ambiguities I see are between proper nouns
and common nouns, which I guess you could claim is a word class
problem (e.g. between "Time" (magazine) and "time" (noun/verb)).
Most databases in commercial use don't distinguish upper/lower
case or more accurately, proper nouns from common nouns in full-text
search.

It has occurred to me that a list of these types of conflicts would
be useful, but I've never seen such.

Of course there are numerous instances of the OTHER form of
ambiguity. To see some instances try using the Citation Indexes
produced by ISI via their Permuterm Keyword Indexes to find
articles exclusively on any one topic. The problem is that
specialized fields reuse common shortened forms of words
for their own jargon, e.g. in "Yachting" magazine the term "cat"
refers to a catamarand, not a feline.

Look in a dictionary such as the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of
Scientific and Technical Terms where they differentiate the
senses by subjects. It is not at all uncommon for a term such
"event" to have numerous meanings depending upon what discipline
one is discussing.

So, that's two sets of lexical ambiguity problems, a proper-noun/
common-noun conflict which prevades news text; and a technical
terminology/jargon ambiguity which prevades sublanguages.

There are others too, such as would occur in failure to recognize
open compounds and assuming the constituent words in those
compounds still had their individual meanings. "stock market"
for instance loses most of the meanings of "stock" (e.g. base
for soup; handle of a gun; livestock).

Finally, here's an instance I once encountered... A reference to
Shirley Temple's adult movies caught me off guard until I
realized they were referring not to her being a porn actress,
but having been a child star (who presumably made at least one
movie after growing up and becoming an adult). Alas, I guess
you'd consider that a word class issue? i.e. between the open
noun compound "adult movie" and the adjective "adult" used to
modify the noun "movie"?