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AMBIGUITY AND THE LEXICON: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON POLYSEMY Introduction Background information Recent development of artificial intelligence (AI) has push the discussion of polysemy onto the front stage \brought considerably much more attention to this formerly neglected phenomenon We believe that it is acceptable for a semantics to be based on the notion of word sense as used by traditional lexicography in constructing dictionaries. To put the matter another way, the inability of programs to cope with lexical ambiguity was a major reason for the failure of early computational linguistics tasks like machine translation. Yet it does follow from that failure that the lexical ambiguity distinguished by conventional dictionaries has any real significance for e.g. in the claim that a word such as play has eight senses that are then distinguished and described? The point can perhaps be put most clearly by considering the suggestion that there never was lexical ambiguity until dictionaries...

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