A Perspective on Word Sense Disambiguation Methods and Their Evaluation
Philip Resnik · 1997
In this position paper, we make several observations about the state of the art in automatic word sense disambiguation. Motivated by these observations, we offer several specific proposals to the community regarding improved evaluation criteria, common training and testing resources, and the definition of sense inventories. 1 Introduction Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is perhaps the great open problem at the lexical level of natural language processing. If one requires part-of-speech tagging for some task, it is now possible to obtain high performance off the shelf; if one needs morphological analysis, software and lexical data are not too hard to find. In both cases, performance of stateof -the-art systems is respectable, if not perfect, and the fundamentals of the dominant approaches (noisy channel models for tagging, two-level morphology) are by now well understood. For word sense disambiguation, we have a far longer way to go. 2 Observations Observation 1. Evaluation of word s...