In computational linguistics, word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the problem of determining in which sense a word having a number of distinct senses is used in a given sentence. For example, consider the word bass, two distinct senses of which are:
To a human it is obvious the first sentence is using the word bass in sense 2 above, and in the second sentence it is being used in sense 1. But although this seems obvious to a human, developing algorithms to replicate this human ability is a difficult task.