Word sense disambiguation (WSD) plays a crucial role in text summarization by resolving ambiguities in word meanings. When summarizing a text, it is important to accurately understand the correct sense of words to capture the intended semantics and convey the essence of the original text effectively. Here are a few ways in which WSD assists in text summarization:

  1. Contextual understanding: WSD helps in determining the appropriate sense of a word based on its surrounding context. This allows the summarization system to accurately interpret the meaning of the word in that particular context. Without disambiguation, the summary may misrepresent or confuse the reader by using the wrong sense.

  2. Avoiding redundancy: WSD can identify when multiple senses of a word appear in the same document and help the summarization system to avoid redundant information. By disambiguating the senses, the system can select the most relevant sense for inclusion in the summary, eliminating unnecessary repetition.

  3. Capturing key information: Disambiguating word senses aids in capturing the most important information from the original text. The correct sense of a word often contains critical details or key concepts that need to be included in the summary. By disambiguating word senses, the summarization system can ensure that salient information is not overlooked.

  4. Improving coherence: Word sense disambiguation helps in maintaining coherence between the summary sentences. By resolving word ambiguities, the system can select the appropriate sense of a word consistently throughout the summary, resulting in better overall coherence and cohesion.

  5. Enhancing user understanding: WSD can assist in producing summaries that are more comprehensible and aligned with the user's understanding. By accurately reflecting the intended meanings of words, summaries generated with the help of word sense disambiguation can reduce ambiguity and aid in conveying the original text effectively to the readers.

  In summary, word sense disambiguation assists in text summarization by providing a more accurate interpretation of word meanings, reducing redundancy, capturing key information, improving coherence, and enhancing user understanding. By leveraging WSD techniques, summarization systems can generate more concise and meaningful summaries.