Arabic word sense disambiguation: a review

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a specific task of computational linguistics which aims at automatically identifying the correct sense of a given ambiguous word from a set of predefined senses. In WSD the goal is to tag each ambiguous word in a text with one of the senses known a priori. In Arabic, the main cause of word ambiguity is the lack of diacritics of the most digital documents so the same word can occur with different senses. In this paper, we introduce the reader to the motivation for solving the ambiguity of Arabic words and we detail a description of the task. We overview supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and knowledge-based approaches. The evaluation of Arabic WSD systems is also discussed. Finally, we discuss open problems and future directions.