Essay On Ambiguities In Natural Language

1466 Words3 Pages

Ambiguities in Natural Language Processing
Anjali M K1
, Babu Anto P2
Department of Information Technology, Kannur University, Kerala, India1,2
ABSTRACT: Ambiguity can be referred as the ability of having more than one meaning or being understood in more than one way. Natural languages are ambiguous, so computers are not able to understand language the way people do.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is concerned with the development of computational models of aspects of human language processing. Ambiguity can occur at various levels of NLP. Ambiguity could be Lexical, Syntactic, Semantic,
Pragmatic etc. This paper presents a study about different types of ambiguities that comes under Natural Language
Processing.
KEYWORDS: Ambiguity, Natural …show more content…

Consider the example,
The horse ran up the hill. It was very steep. It soon got tired.
The anaphoric reference of ‘it’ in the two situations cause ambiguity.
Steep applies to surface hence ‘it’ can be hill. Tired applies to animate object hence ‘it’ can be horse.
2.5 Pragmatic Ambiguity: Pragmatic ambiguity refers to a situation where the context of a phrase gives it multiple interpretation [2]. One of the hardest tasks in NLP.The problem involves processing user intention, sentiment, belief world, modals etc.- all of whichare highly complex tasks.[3]
Consider the example,
Tourist (checking out of the hotel): Waiter, go upstairs to myroom and see if my sandals are there; do not be late; I have tocatch the train in 15 minutes.
Waiter (running upstairs and coming back panting): Yes sir,they are there.
Clearly, the waiter is falling short of the expectation of thetourist, since he does not understand the pragmatics of the situation.[3] Pragmatic ambiguity arises when the statement is not specific, and the context does not provide the information needed to clarify the statement. Information is missing, and must be inferred.[5]
Consider the example
I love you

More about Essay On Ambiguities In Natural Language

Open Document