Lexical Semantics
In lexical semantics there are two phenomena:
ambiguity:
- a word is ambiguous when its meaning varies depending on the context where it occurs
variability:
- same concept can be referred to using different words
most of words are ambiguous and many concepts can be expressed differently
WSD is an NLP problem of assigning concepts to words
Any automatic WSD algorithm does at least the following:
- defining a “sense repository” that describes different concepts
-
assigning concepts to words in context
- Ambiguity: one word is related to several concepts
- Variability: several different words are related to the same concept
If we link all words and concepts, we’ll get a Semantic Network
- for example, WordNet is such a network