Why does a search engine return irrelevant results when a query contains semantically ambiguous words?

💡 Explanation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the mechanism that identifies the correct meaning of a word in context. The search engine struggles because the semantic ambiguity creates multiple interpretations; therefore, the engine retrieves results for all potential meanings rather than the intended one, because WSD failure dominates over syntactic parsing errors or phonetic overlap.

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