Using Deep Learning to Interpret Words with Many Meanings

Bank. Fair. Duck. Out of context, each word has multiple meanings. A bank is where you keep your money or the side of a river. Fair is where you climb into a Ferris wheel or your assessment of the ride. Duck is how you avoid injury from an incoming, same-named waterfowl. Humans typically don’t have a problem figuring out which meaning of a word applies where. But natural language processing models are a different story. AI tools to parse text have been around for years, but they run into a stumbling block when it comes to words with multiple meanings.