In computational linguistics,
word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is used in any given sentence, when the word has a number of distinct senses.
For example, consider two examples of the distinct senses that exist for the (written) word
bass:
- a type of fish
- tones of low frequency
and the sentences:
- I went fishing for some sea bass
- The bass line of the song is too weak
To a human, it is obvious that the first sentence is using the word
bass, as in the former sense above and in the second sentence, the word
bass is being used as in the latter sense below. Developing algorithms to replicate this human ability can often be a difficult task.
Wikipedia uses it to help distinguish what users are searching for
and points them in the right direction to get an accurate search.