Natural Language Processing: A Perspective from Computation in Presence of Ambiguity, Resource Constraint and Multilinguality

Language is a hallmark of intelligence, and endowing computers with the ability to analyze and generate languagea field of research known as Natural Language Processing (NLP)has been the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this paper we give a perspective of NLP from the point of view of ambiguity processing and computing under resource constraint. Language is fraught with ambiguity at all levels, be they morphemes, words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. We first discuss these ambiguities with examples. Then we take a particular case of disambiguationword sense disambiguation (WSD)and discuss its solution in the face of multilinguality and resource constraint, namely, scarcity of annotated data. Multilinguality is one of the powerful instruments of leveraging shared resource.