Ambiguity

Poesio, Massimo

doi:10.1002/9781118788516.sem098

Cited by 2 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…Other scholars, such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, have argued that ambiguity in the form of metaphor is pervasive and at the root of all human cognition, including scientific reasoning (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008). This stands in sharp contrast to the common assumption that language predominantly has a precise, literal meaning in scientific and legal discourse (Poesio, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Despite the practical and theoretical importance of ambiguity, we lack a conceptual framework that can guide interdisciplinary synthesis and empirical research on its properties and value for science. I focus on a particular form of ambiguity, known as polysemy or lexical ambiguity, which applies to words with multiple meanings (Poesio, 2020). (The term "ambiguity" itself has been used to describe different types of things, including words, actions, and situations, and with respect to different aspects, such as their uncertainty, vagueness, or multiple possible interpretations (Poesio, 2020;Sennet, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I focus on a particular form of ambiguity, known as polysemy or lexical ambiguity, which applies to words with multiple meanings (Poesio, 2020). (The term "ambiguity" itself has been used to describe different types of things, including words, actions, and situations, and with respect to different aspects, such as their uncertainty, vagueness, or multiple possible interpretations (Poesio, 2020;Sennet, 2021). Polysemy is especially relevant to data reuse when it occurs in technical terms important for describing the contents and significance of empirical results, such as with "species" in systematic biology, "function" for genetic sequences, or "interactions" in ecology (Nakazawa, 2020;Linquist et al, 2020;Stankowski & Ravinet, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Polysemy is especially relevant to data reuse when it occurs in technical terms important for describing the contents and significance of empirical results, such as with "species" in systematic biology, "function" for genetic sequences, or "interactions" in ecology (Nakazawa, 2020;Linquist et al, 2020;Stankowski & Ravinet, 2021). I should also note that many lexicographers distinguish polysemy from homonymy (Poesio, 2020), which occurs when the same lexical unit (i.e. string of characters) has unrelated meanings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A classic example is "bank," which many dictionaries treat as two distinct words because the meanings of financial institution and sloping land next to a river are unrelated and can in fact be traced to different etymologies. However, this distinction is not universally followed within linguistics, and the proposed criteria for distinguishing polysemy and homonymy are contested and difficult to standardize even in the context of dictionary making-for more discussion, see (Poesio, 2020). I will therefore use polysemy in the broad sense that includes homonyms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Explaining ambiguity in scientific language

Sterner

2022

Synthese

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The idea that ambiguity can be productive in data science remains controversial. Efforts to make scientific publications and data intelligible to computers generally assume that accommodating multiple meanings for words, known as polysemy, undermines reasoning and communication. This assumption has nonetheless been contested by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, who have applied qualitative research methods to demonstrate the generative and strategic value of polysemy. Recent quantitative results from linguistics have also shown how polysemy can actually improve the efficiency of human communication. I present a new conceptual typology based on a synthesis of prior research about the aims, norms, and circumstances under which polysemy arises and is evaluated. The typology supports a contextual pluralist view of polysemy's value for scientific research practices: polysemy does both substantial positive and negative work in science, but its utility is context-sensitive in ways that are often overlooked by the norms people have formulated to regulate its use, including prior scholars researching polysemy. I also propose that historical patterns in the use of partial synonyms, i.e. terms with overlapping meanings, provide an especially promising phenomenon for integrative research addressing these issues.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Explaining ambiguity in scientific language

Sterner

2022

Synthese

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Polysemy—Evidence from Linguistics, Behavioral Science, and Contextualized Language Models

Haber,

Poesio

2024

Computational Linguistics

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Polysemy is the type of lexical ambiguity where a word has multiple distinct but related interpretations. In the past decade, it has been the subject of a great many studies across multiple disciplines including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics, which have made it increasingly clear that the complexity of polysemy precludes simple, universal answers, especially concerning the representation and processing of polysemous words. But fuelled by the growing availability of large, crowdsourced datasets providing substantial empirical evidence; improved behavioral methodology; and the development of contextualised language models capable of encoding the fine-grained meaning of a word within a given context, the literature on polysemy recently has developed more complex theoretical analyses. In this survey we discuss these recent contributions to the investigation of polysemy against the backdrop of a long legacy of research across multiple decades and disciplines. Our aim is to bring together different perspectives to achieve a more complete picture of the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomenon of polysemy. Specifically, we highlight evidence supporting a range of hybrid models of the mental processing of polysemes. These hybrid models combine elements from different previous theoretical approaches to explain patterns and idiosyncrasies in the processing of polysemous that the best known models so far have failed to account for. Our literature review finds that i) traditional analyses of polysemy can be limited in their generalisability by loose definitions and selective materials; ii) linguistic tests provide useful evidence on individual cases, but fail to capture the full range of factors involved in the processing of polysemous sense extensions; and iii) recent behavioural (psycho) linguistics studies, largescale annotation efforts and investigations leveraging contextualised language models provide accumulating evidence suggesting that polysemous sense similarity covers a wide spectrum between identity of sense and homonymy-like unrelatedness of meaning. We hope that the interdisciplinary account of polysemy provided in this survey inspires further fundamental research on the nature of polysemy and better equips applied research to deal with the complexity surrounding the phenomenon, e.g. by enabling the development of benchmarks and testing paradigms for large language models informed by a greater portion of the rich evidence on the phenomenon currently available.

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Ambiguity

Cited by 2 publications

References 90 publications

Explaining ambiguity in scientific language

Explaining ambiguity in scientific language

Polysemy—Evidence from Linguistics, Behavioral Science, and Contextualized Language Models

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