Ambiguity Avoidance is Overrated

In other words, natural language is highly ambiguous. A search of any good dictionary will reveal that most words have multiple definitions, and (as first noted by Zipf, 1949) more frequent words tend to be more ambiguous. Likewise, as computational linguists discovered a few decades ago, most strings of words that constitute well-formed sentences have multiple possible parses. For example, Martin, et al (1987) reported that their system assigned 455 distinct parses to the relatively simple sentence List sales of the products produced in 1973 with the products produced in 1972. In addition, there are other ambiguities that do not seem to be tied either to polysemous words or alternative parses. Among these is perhaps the most widely studied type of ambiguity, scope ambiguity. I will return to a more careful taxonomy of types of ambiguity in the next section.