Homonymy and polysemy in information retrieval

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Abstract
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 better understanding of word-based methods, and suggest where natural language processing can provide further improvements in retrieval performance.

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