By Elijah Enos
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the challenges faced by information designers attempting to process instances of polysemy in natural language, as well as an overview of proposed solutions. Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon in which one word will have more than one meaning. This creates a challenge for users of search engines and databases, who may have difficulty finding proper results, as well as for designers, who must create systems that can recognize nuances in natural language, even as this language changes and evolves. The issue of specialized disciplines with complex vocabularies is also addressed. Solutions proposed and tested include the addition of pseudo words to descriptor lists, and the utilizing of word webs – through Latent Semantic Analysis – to link similar terms together. Issues addressed for consideration in the future include designers’ ability to recognize polysemy within and across multiple languages and the role that voice recognition systems (i.e. Siri, Cortana) might play.
