Reduction of lexical ambiguity

Summary We examine various issues faced during the elaboration of lexical disambiguators, e.g. issues related with linguistic analyses underlying disambiguators, and we exemplify these issues with grammatical constraints. We also examine computational problems and show how they are connected with linguistic problems: the influence of the granularity of tagsets, the definition of realistic and useful objectives, and the construction of the data required for the reduction of ambiguity. We show why a formalism is required for automatic ambiguity reduction, we analyse its function and we present a typology of such formalisms.