Ambiguity Handling: Human vs. Machine

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Fremdsprachliche Philologien), course: Proseminar Semantics, language: English, abstract: ¿Ambiguity is pervasive at all levels of analysis. It has been, is, and is likely to remain the key problem in natural language processing.¿ (Gadzar 1993:161) This statement by Gerald Gadzar expresses the necessity to cope with the challenge of ambiguity resolution. As the phenomenon of ambiguity is widespread in human language, an interesting question would be: How could a machine be able to handle ambiguity while even humans have difficulties in solving such problems?

This paper will first define the phenomenon of ambiguity and explain the different types of it. An interesting aspect will be the effect of garden path sentences.