A Literature Survey on Various Approaches of Word Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the process of selecting the correct sense for a word in a context. WSD has become a growing research area in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Over the decades, lot of studies had been carried out to suggest different approaches for WSD process. A break-through in this field would have a significant impact on many relevant web-based applications, such as information retrieval (IR), information extraction etc. This paper describes various approaches of WSD like knowledge based approach, supervised approach, unsupervised approach and semi-supervised approach. It also describes various applications of WSD like information retrieval (IR), machine translation (MT), speech recognition, computational advertising, text processing, classification of documents and biometrics.