Theory and practice of ambiguity labelling with a view to interactive disambiguation in text and speech MT

In many contexts, automatic analyzers cannot fully disambiguate a sentence or an utterance reliably, but can produce ambiguous results containing the correct interpretation. It is useful to study vatious properties of these ambiguities in the view of subsequent total or partial interactive disambiguation. We have proposed a technique for labelling ambiguities in texts and in dialogue transcriptions, and experimented it on multilingual data. It has been first necessary to define formally the very notion of ambiguity relative to a representation system, as well as associated concepts such as ambiguity kernel, ambiguity scope, ambiguity occurrence.