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<Paper uid="H05-1051">
  <Title>Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), pages 403-410, Vancouver, October 2005. c(c)2005 Association for Computational Linguistics Differentiating Homonymy and Polysemy in Information Retrieval</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recent studies into Web retrieval have shown that word sense disambiguation can increase retrieval effectiveness. However, it remains unclear as to the minimum disambiguation accuracy required and the granularity with which one must define word sense in order to maximize these benefits. This study answers these questions using a simulation of the effects of ambiguity on information retrieval. It goes beyond previous studies by differentiating between homonymy and polysemy. Results show that retrieval is more sensitive to polysemy than homonymy and that, when resolving polysemy, accuracy as low as 55% can potentially lead to increased performance.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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