Word Sense Disambiguation by Human Subjects: Computational and Psycholinguistic Applications
Thomas Ahlswede, David Lorand · 1993
Although automated word sense disambiguation has become a popular activity within computational lexicology, evaluation of the accuracy of disambiguation systems is still mostly limited to manual checking by the developer. This paper describes our work in collecting data on the disambiguation behavior of human subjects, with the intention of providing (1) a norm against which dictionary-based systems (and perhaps others) can be evaluated, and (2) a source of psycholinguistic information about previously unobserved aspects of human disambiguation, for the use of both psycholinguists and computational researchers. We also describe two of our most important tools: a questionnaire of ambiguous test words in various contexts, and a hypertext user interface for efficient and powerful collection of data from human subjects.