Theoretical linguistic accounts of lexical ambiguity distinguish between homonymy, where words that share a lexical form have unrelated meanings, and polysemy, where the meanings are related. The present study explored the psychological reality of this theoretical assumption by asking whether there is evidence that homonyms and polysemes are represented and processed differently in the brain. W...

The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause (e.g., ‘‘The room searched by the police was . . .’’), both the participle and past tense forms of the ambiguous verb (‘‘searched’’) a...

This paper assesses several broad approaches to language analysis with respect to the problem of lexical ambiguity. The impact of the problem on both syntactic and semantic analysis is discussed, and several common methods for disambiguation, including the use of selectional restrictions and scriptal lexicons, are analyzed. Their shortcomings illustrate the need for complex inference to resolve...

UNLABELLED Theories of translation differ in the role assigned to the reformulation process. One view, the "horizontal" approach, considers that translation involves on-line searches for matches between linguistic entries in the two languages involved [Gerver, D. (1976). Empirical studies of simultaneous interpretation: A review and a model. In R. W. Brislin (Ed.), Translation: Applications and...

This paper presents an implemented, computationally inexpensive technique for disambiguating categories (parts of speech) by exploiting constraints on possible category combinations. Early resolutions of category ambiguities provide a great deal of leverage, simplifying later resolutions of other types of lexical ambiguity. Prioritized pattern action rules (CONDS) are specified for each known c...

Lexical ambiguity is a fundamental problem in Information Retrieval (IR), especially in the medical domain. Many systems use a subset of the words contained in the document to represent the content, but they are faced with the problem of ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a method for disambiguation based on existing medical terminological resources on the one hand, and statistical tools for ...

Lexical ambiguity, the ambiguity arising from a string with multiple meanings, is pervasive in language of all domains. Word sense disambiguation (WSD) and word sense induction (WSI) are the tasks of resolving this ambiguity. Applications in the clinical and biomedical domain focus on the potential disambiguation has for information extraction. Most approaches to the problem are unsupervised or...

Pustejovsky, J. and B. Boguraev, Lexical knowledge representation and natural language processing, Artificial Intelligence 63 (1993) 193-223. Traditionally, semantic information in computational lexicons is limited to notions such as selectional restrictions or domain-specific constraints, encoded in a "static" representation. This information is typically used in natural language processing by...