<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P97-1010">
  <Title>Homonymy and Polysemy in Information Retrieval</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper discusses research on distinguishing word meanings in the context of information retrieval systems. We conducted experiments with three sources of evidence for making these distinctions: morphology, part-of-speech, and phrases. We have focused on the distinction between homonymy and polysemy (unrelated vs. related meanings). Our results support the need to distinguish homonymy and polysemy. We found: 1) grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance, 2) that more than half of all words in a dictionary that differ in part-of-speech are related in meaning, and 3) that it is crucial to assign credit to the component words of a phrase. These experiments provide a better understanding of word-based methods, and suggest where natural language processing can provide further improvements in retrieval performance. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>