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Engineering “word experts” for word disambiguation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Daniel Berleant
Daniel Berleant
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Systems EngineeringUniversity of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA Email: djb@engr.uark.edu
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Abstract

Every word in the lexicon of a natural language is used distinctly from all the other words. A word expert is a small expert system-like module for processing a particular word based on other words in its vicinity. A word expert exploits the idiosyncratic nature of a word by using a set of context testing decision rules that test the identity and placement of context words to infer the word's role in the passage.

The main application of word experts is disambiguating words. Work on word experts has never fully recognized previous related work, and a comprehensive review of that work would therefore contribute to the field. This paper both provides such a review, and describes guidelines and considerations useful in the design and construction of word expert based systems.

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Articles
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Natural Language Engineering , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 339 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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