Resolving Ambiguities of Meaning from Contextual Clues in Polish Texts

This article describes a computer programme designed to assign the appropriate meaning to homonyms based on the context in which they appear Homonyms can be defined as words with a number of d@rent, o#en unrelated meanings 0'or example a bank - a business that lends or keeps money the land along the side of river; a large pile of earth, sand snow). The programme described in the paper exploits a monolingual dictionary which, together with and supported by declension dictionary assigns the appropriate meaning for any given word from the text. In order to assign the correct and appropriate meaning for the given context two methods are used and exploited: 1) Recognition of the meaning of a particular homonym based on the occurrence of its collocations in the immediate context. 2) Applying the correct meaning ofthe word based on the overall theme or topic of the text in which appears.