Word Sense Disambiguation

A story of how ambiguous word meanings caused an AI Winter.

The history and development of Artificial Intelligence has seen numerous peaks and troughs. Hype around what machines can accomplish lead to boosts in AI funding while unmet expectations cripple the industry until the next breakthrough. The term AI Winter refers to periods in history of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence development.

Machine Translation and the Cold War

During the cold war, there was an increased interest in Machine Translation to automate the translation of Russian documents into English. This time period also coincided with massive strides in linguistic developments and the early career of the famed linguist Noam Chomsky.

In addition to his research on grammar understanding, Noam Chomsky was a consultant to several military backed NLP projects. The looming fear of nuclear war combined with our new found understanding of grammar was the perfect beginning of an AI hype.

Common Sense Knowledge Problem

Humans often take common sense for granted. Our brains are so well wired that we seldom consider the complexities of our simplest inferences. This was a big problem in the 1960s where we expected…