Word sense disambiguation and information retrieval

In recent years, great advances have been made in the speed, accuracy, and coverage of automatic word sense disambiguators - systems that given a word appearing in a certain context, can identify the sense of that word. This research has prompted a number of investigations into the relationship between information retrieval (IR) and lexical ambiguity. The work presented in this thesis is such an exploration. It goes beyond previous research, however, by studying not only the relationship of ambiguity to IR, but also that of disambiguation to IR. Starting with a review of previous research that attempted to improve the representation of documents in IR systems, this research is reassessed in the light of word sense ambiguity. It will be shown that a number of the attempts successes or failures were due to the noticing or ignoring of ambiguity. In the review of disambiguation research, many varied techniques for performing automatic disambiguation are introduced. Research on the disambi...