Abstract
How do humans resolve semantically ambiguous words? It happens that we will not find a direct answer from psycholinguistic studies. Nevertheless, through probing the organisation of words in the mental lexicon and the access of words, particularly those with multiple meanings, in the human mind, useful hints might be found. In this chapter, we focus our attention on the cognitive aspects of word sense disambiguation. We first review the psychological findings on the mental lexicon, including the storage of words, the representation of meanings, and sense distinction. Mechanisms of lexical access will then be discussed, especially with reference to the different factors which might affect semantic activation. Where appropriate, how such psychological models have been realised computationally in automatic word sense disambiguation will be highlighted.
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Notes
- 1.
The boundary is often fuzzy between concepts and words, and even senses, when they are discussed in the context of semantic memory. For simplicity, we will roughly treat the nodes in a semantic network as corresponding to some lexicalised concepts.
- 2.
Large-scale word association data are also available for Japanese (Joyce 2005) and German (Schulte im Walde et al. 2008).
- 3.
Yuret and Yatbaz (2010), for instance, have mentioned that the abstract classes were responsible for most of the errors in their supersense tagging with unsupervised method. More in-depth analysis of the concreteness effect will be needed, especially with respect to mainstream supervised WSD.
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Kwong, O.Y. (2013). The Psychology of WSD. In: New Perspectives on Computational and Cognitive Strategies for Word Sense Disambiguation. SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1320-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1320-2_4
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Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-1320-2
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