site:wikipedia.org jim smith football

Although in this case, it doesn’t matter because the unrestricted results are the same: wikipedia pages for the American and English players are 1 and 2.

In Powerset, they’re 1 and 3.

Neither, of course, explicitly disambiguates the two players.

There’s a subtler disambiguation to be made as well. Both players’ pages include ‘Birmingham’ but that’s also ambiguous, one’s Alabama and the other England.

Here’s how I see it. Making linguistic sense of texts is a long-term challenge. Years ago I interviewed on of the early MT researchers, who said: “It’s more perspiration than inspiration”.

The trick will be to make as much appropriate and effective use of this gradually evolving technology as is possible, while avoiding inappropriate/ineffective use to the extent possible. And that’s going to be a real balancing act, which is part of what makes the whole thing so interesting.