Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock (editors) (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Educational Testing Services) New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, xi+227 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-19-823842-8, $74.00, £45.00; paperbound, ISBN 0-19-925086-3, $21.95, £14.99
Jean Véronis · Computational Linguistics · 2002
As the editors of this volume remind us, polysemy has been a vexing issue for the understanding of language since antiquity. 1For half a century, it has been a major bottleneck for natural language processing.It contributed to the failure of early machine translation research (remember Bar-Hillel's famous pen and box example) and is still plaguing most natural language processing and information retrieval applications.A recent issue of this journal described the state of the art in automatic sense disambiguation (Ide and Véronis 1998), and Senseval system competitions have revealed the immense difficulty of the task (http://www.sle.sharp.co.uk/senseval2).However, no significant progress can be made on the computational aspects of polysemy without serious advances in theoretical issues.At the same time, theoretical work can be fostered by computational results and problems, and language-processing applications can provide a unique test bed for theories.It was therefore an excellent idea to gather both theoretical and applied contributions in the same book.Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock are well-known names to those who work on the theoretical and computational aspects of word meaning.In this volume, they bring together a collection of essays from leading researchers in the field.As far as I can tell, these essays are not reprints or expanded versions of conference papers, as is often the case for edited works; instead, they seem to have been specially commissioned for the purposes of this book, which makes it even more exciting to examine.The book is composed of 11 chapters.It is not formally divided into parts, but chapters dealing more specifically with the computational aspects of polysemy are grouped together at the end (and constitute about one-third of the volume).Chapter 1 is an overview written by the volume editors.Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock survey the main theories of meaning and their treatment of polysemy.These include the classical Aristotelian approach revived by Katz and Fodor (1963);Rosch's (1977) prototypical approach, which has its roots in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953); and the relational approach recently exemplified by WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), which (although the authors do not mention it) can be traced back to Peirce's (1931-1958) and Selz's (1913, 1922) graphs and which gained popularity with Quillian's (1968) semantic networks.In the course of this overview, Ravin and Leacock put the individual chapters into perspective by relating them to the various theories.