Editing Word-sense disambiguation (section)

==History==
WSD was first formulated as a distinct computational task during the early days of machine translation in the 1940s, making it one of the oldest problems in computational linguistics. [[Warren Weaver]] first introduced the problem in a computational context in his 1949 memorandum on translation.{{sfn|Weaver|1949|pp=}} Later, [[Yehoshua Bar-Hillel|Bar-Hillel]] (1960) argued{{sfn|Bar-Hillel|1964|pp=174–179}} that WSD could not be solved by "electronic computer" because of the need in general to model all world knowledge.

In the 1970s, WSD was a subtask of semantic interpretation systems developed within the field of artificial intelligence, starting with [[Yorick Wilks|Wilks]]' preference semantics. However, since WSD systems were at the time largely rule-based and hand-coded they were prone to a knowledge acquisition bottleneck.

By the 1980s large-scale lexical resources, such as the [[Advanced learner's dictionary|Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English]] (OALD), became available: hand-coding was replaced with knowledge automatically extracted from these resources, but disambiguation was still knowledge-based or dictionary-based.

In the 1990s, the statistical revolution advanced computational linguistics, and WSD became a paradigm problem on which to apply supervised machine learning techniques.

The 2000s saw supervised techniques reach a plateau in accuracy, and so attention has shifted to coarser-grained senses, [[domain adaptation]], semi-supervised and unsupervised corpus-based systems, combinations of different methods, and the return of knowledge-based systems via graph-based methods. Still, supervised systems continue to perform best.