Word sense disambiguation is a core research problem in computational
linguistics, which was recognized at the beginning of the scientific interest
in machine translation and artificial intelligence. And yet no book has been
fully devoted to review the wide variety of approaches to solving the problem.
The time is right for such a book.
This book had its genesis over five years ago when Nancy Ide, series coeditor
of then Kluwer’s, now Springer’s, Text, Speech, and Language
Technology series, approached us with the project. Word sense disambiguation
is an active and quickly progressing research field, so we
thought it far more beneficial to the research community if we were to
enlist the main experts to each give their own view of the field.
This is the first comprehensive book to cover all aspects of word sense disambiguation. It covers major algorithms, techniques, performance measures, results, philosophical issues and applications. The text synthesizes past and current research across the field, and helps developers grasp which techniques will best apply to their particular application, how to build and evaluate systems, and what performance to expect. An accompanying Website extends the effectiveness of the text.