Disambiguation, or word-sense disambiguation (WSD), is the process of resolving ambiguity in language by determining the correct meaning of a word based on its context. Many words have multiple meanings, and the same word can be interpreted in different ways depending on the surrounding text. Disambiguation helps AI systems accurately interpret these terms by selecting the appropriate meaning.
For example, the word “bank” could refer to a financial institution or the side of a river. Word-sense disambiguation analyzes the context in which the word appears to choose the correct interpretation, enabling more accurate language understanding in tasks such as natural language processing (NLP), machine translation, and search queries.