Homonymy and polysemy in information retrieval
Robert Krovetz · 1997
This paper discusses research on distinguishing word meanings in the context of information retrieval systems.We conducted experiments with three sources of evidence for making these distinctions: morphology, part-of-speech, and phrases.We have focused on the distinction between homonymy and polysemy (unrelated vs. related meanings).Our results support the need to distinguish homonymy and polysemy.We found: 1) grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance, 2) that more than half of all words in a dictionary that differ in part-of-speech are related in meaning, and 3) that it is crucial to assign credit to the component words of a phrase.These experiments provide a better understanding of word-based methods, and suggest where natural language processing can provide further improvements in retrieval performance.