The lexical component of natural language processing
George Armitage Miller · 1999
Of the various problems that natural language processing has revealed, polysemy is probably the most frustrating. People deal with polysemy so easily that potential abiguities are overlooked, whereas computers must work hard to do far less well. A linguistic approach generally involves a parser, a lexicon, and some ad hoc rules for using linguistic context to identify the context-appropriate sense. A statistical approach generally involves the use of word co-occurrence statistics to create a semantic hyperspace where each word, regardless of its polysemy, is represented as a single vector. Each approach has strengths and limitations; some combination is often proposed. Various possibilities will be discussed in terms of their psychological plausibility.