Asian Science
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Abstract: It has often been thought that word sense ambiguity
is a cause of poor performance in Information Retrieval (IR) systems.
The belief is that if ambiguous words can be correctly disambiguated,
IR performance will increase. However, recent research into the application
of a word sense disambiguator to an IR system failed to show any performance
increase. From these results it has become clear that more basic research
is needed to investigate the relationship between sense ambiguity, disambiguation
and IR. Using a technique that introduces additional sense ambiguity into
a collection, this study presents research that goes beyond previous work
in this field to reveal the influence that ambiguity and disambiguation
have on a probabilistic IR system. We conclude that word sense ambiguity
is only problematic to an IR system when it is retrieving from very short
queries. In addition we argue that if a word sense disambiguator is to
be of any use to an IR system, the disambiguator must be able to resolve
word senses to a high degree of accuracy.