Defining Linear Context to Resolve Lexical Ambiguity

Abstract

This paper sets out a mechanical procedure for eliminating ambiguities in machine translation in cases where a word in the source language has a number of equivalents in the target language. The procedure depends on the inspection of linear word context and the establishing of “diagnostic environments” for the ambiguous words. In the experiment described, the context was restricted to one word before and one following the ambiguous word. It demonstrated that considerable reduction in the number of ambiguities can be achieved by the procedure and that the word following the ambiguous word is more effective than the word preceding in resolving the ambiguity.