Common Specification Mark Heuristic

In most cases, the senses of the words to be disambiguated are very close to each other and only differ in subtle differences in nuances. The Common Specification Mark heuristic reduce the ambiguity of a word without trying to provide a full disambiguation. Thus, we select the specification mark that is common to all senses of the context words, reporting all senses instead of choosing a single sense from among them. To illustrate this heuristic, consider Figure 7. In this example, the word month is not able to discriminate completely among four senses of the word year. However, in this case, the presence of the word month can help to select two possible senses of the word year when selecting the time period, period as a common specification mark. This specification mark represents the most specific common synset of a particular set of words. Therefore, this heuristic selects the sense month#1 and senses year#1 and year#2 instead of attempting to choose a single sense or leaving them completely ambiguous.

Figure 7: Example of Common Specification Mark Heuristic