LINGUIST List 3.411

Fri 15 May 1992

Sum: Human Sense Disambiguation

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1. Mark Sanderson, Human sense disambiguation

Last year I sent out a request to the Linguist List asking the following...

> I am doing some research into word sense disambiguation applied to
> information retrieval. Recently I was reading a paper that said,
>
> "a number of researchers in text processing have observed that people can
> consistently determine the sense of a word simply by examining the half
> dozen or so words just before and after the word in focus."
>
> But then the paper doesn't seem to directly reference any papers mentioning
> this. I would really like to track down these papers, does anyone have a
> reference for them ?

Someone has just contacted me asking for a summary of the answers. I guess
I should've done this ages ago. Still, better late than never. I got many
replies but not all that many references that were what I needed. Here are
four references that are probably worth a look. The first two I've found
and they are spot on. The others I havn't seen. Thanks to everyone who
replied, it was a great help.

Y. Choueka and S. Luisgnan, "Disambiguation by Short Contexts",
 "Computers and the Humanities", 19(3), pp147-157,1985

Miller, G. A., "Annual Review of Psychology",
 Communication, vol 5, pp401-420, 1954
(This contains a summary of work carried out by Abraham Kaplan)

Graeme Hirst,	"Semantic Interpretation and the resolution of Ambiguity",
	Studies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge University Press, 1987,
UK

Kathleen Dahlgren: "Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding",
 Boston : Kluwer, 1988.


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