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<Paper uid="C94-2110">
  <Title>Virtual Polysemy</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="699" end_page="699" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> If the computational analysis of natural language is to approach the ease with which language users manage the contextual determination of word usage, an approach to lexical ambiguity is needed which capitalizes on the regularity of sense extensions to avoid undiscriminated generation of word uses during sentencc processing. Our proposal to achieve this objective is to use lexical polymorphism with deterministic contextual sort resolution within a type feature structure formalism. Such a proposal is based on the intuition that for each class of lexieal ambiguity there is a word substructure whose increnmntal instautiation provides sufficient discriminating information to select a unique solntion. We have shown how a first implementation of such an approach can be realized for the domain of verbal diatheses and envisaged how further refinements can be carried out to arrive at a fidl specification. Although it is too early to establish whether or not the approach can be made to handle all kinds of lexical ambiguity, initial results suggest that our treatment is effective, efficient and has natural applications in domains other than verbal diatheses.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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