Homonymy and Polysemy in Information Retrieval

This paper discusses research on distinguishing word meanings in the context of information retrieval systems. We conducted experiments with three sources of evidence for making these distinctions: morphology, part-of-speech, and phrases. We have focused on the distinction between homonymy and polysemy (unrelated vs. related meanings). Our results support the need to distinguish homonymy and polysemy. We found: 1) grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance, 2) that more than half of all words in a dictionary that differ in part-of-speech are related in meaning, and 3) that it is crucial to assign credit to the component words of a phrase. These experiments provide a better understanding of word-based methods, and suggest where natural language processing can provide further improvements in retrieval performance.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Robert Krovetz
• Keywords: ACL 1997, ACL 2007, Information Retrieval Systems, Paper Discusses Research, Retrieval Performance