Developing a test collection for biomedical word sense disambiguation

Ambiguity, the phenomenon that a word has more than one sense, poses difficulties for many current Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. Algorithms that assist in the resolution of these ambiguities, i.e. which make unambiguous a word, or more generally, a text string, will boost performance of these systems. To test such techniques in the biomedical language domain, we have developed a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) test collection that comprises 5,000 unambiguous instances for 50 ambiguous UMLS Metathesaurus strings.