ABSTRACT
This chapter is a short survey of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), this problem being the central one in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is very diffi cult to write these days about WSD, since beginning with the state of the art work of N. Ide and J. Veronis in Computational Linguistics in 1998 (Ide and Veronis 1998), up to the extended survey of Roberto Navigli in ACM Comput. Survey in 2009 (Navigli 2009), many articles have focused and many books have earmarked one of their chapters on this subject: only two of them are mentioned here, the excellent books (Manning and Shütze 1999) or (Jurafsky and Martin 2000). Moreover, a whole content devoted to WSD is the comprehensive book (Agirre and Edmonds 2006). The present Chapter doesn't go to the details the way the mentioned works do, but refl ects the theme at an appropriate proportion to the ensemble of this book. An attempt was made to approach WSD from an algorithmic point of view, describing algorithms in a way easy to understand, regardless of whether they represent some fundamental algorithms in WSD or not.
