<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<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="8" start_page="408" end_page="409" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This study has highlighted that retrieval systems are more sensitive to polysemy than homonymy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This leads the author to conclude that making fine-grained sense distinctions can offer increased retrieval effectiveness in addition to any benefits brought about by coarse-grained disambiguation. It also emphasises that although coarse-grained disambiguation can be performed to a higher degree of accuracy, this might not directly translate to increased IR performance compared to fine-grained approaches. This is in contrast to current thinking which suggests that coarse-grained approaches are more likely to bring about retrieval performance because of their increased accuracy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In terms of disambiguation accuracy and increased retrieval effectiveness, results show potential benefits where accuracy is as low as 55% when dealing with just polysemy and rises to 76% when  dealing with just homonymy. Obviously this study has simulated two extremes (polysemy or homonymy) and the exact point where performance increases will occur is likely to be dependent on the interaction between homonymy and polysemy in a given query.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> With regard to simulation a more empirical exploration of the ideas expressed in this work would be desirable. However, the size of modern IR test collections dictates that future studies will need to rely more heavily on simulation. Therefore, until such time that a significant manually disambiguated IR collection exists pseudowords remain an interesting way to explore the effects of ambiguity within a large collection. The challenge lies in producing pseudowords that better model real words.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>