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Abstract:
Lexicographers, linguists, and psychologists have long
assumed that a single word has many different senses, and have
argued whether the different senses correspond to separate mental
entities: in psychological parlance, whether they are stored and
accessed separately or at once. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)
casts the issue in a new light. In LSA the meaning of a word (a
letter or phonetic string) is represented as a single
high-dimensional vector whose composition is a condensate of all
the contexts in which it is observed. It can be shown theoretically
(mathematically or geometrically) that a single LSA vector can have
entirely different effects on the meaning of any number of
different passages, and empirically demonstrated that this property
closely mimics several human ambiguity and disambiguation
phenomena.
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