In this work, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) in Bengali language is implemented using unsupervised methodology. In the first phase of this experiment, sentence clustering is performed using Maximum Entropy method and the clusters are labelled with their innate senses by manual intervention, as thesesense-tagged clusters could be used as sense inventories for further experiment. In the next phase, when a test data comes to be disambiguated, the Cosine Similarity Measure is used to find the closeness of that test data withthe initially sense-tagged clusters. The minimum distance of that test data from a particular sense-tagged cluster assigns the same sense to the test data as that of the cluster it is assigned with. This strategy is considered as the baseline strategy, which produces 35% accurate result in WSD task. Next, two extensions are adopted over this baseline strategy: (a) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) over the feature vector, which produces 52% accuracy in WSD task and (b) Context Expansion of the sentences using Bengali WordNet coupled with PCA,which produces 61% accuracy in WSD task. The data sets that are used in this work are obtained from the Bengali corpus, developed under the Technology Development for the Indian Languages (TDIL) project of the Government of India, and the lexical knowledge base (i.e., the Bengali WordNet) used in the work is developed at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, under the Indradhanush Project of the DeitY, Government of India. The challenges and the pitfalls of this work are also described in detail in the pre-conclusion section.

An attempt is made in this paper to report how a supervised methodology has been adopted for the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) in Bengali with necessary modifications. At the initial stage, four commonly used supervised methods, Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial NeuralNetwork (ANN) and Naı¨ve Bayes (NB), are developed at the baseline. These algorithms are applied individually on a data set of 13 most frequently used Bengali ambiguous words. On experimental basis, the baseline strategyis modified with two extensions: (a) inclusion of lemmatization process into the system and (b) bootstrapping of the operational process. As a result, the levels of accuracy of the baseline methods are slightly improved, which is a positive signal for the whole process of disambiguation as it opens scope for further modification of the existing method for better result. In this experiment, the data sets are prepared from the Bengali corpus, developed in the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) project of the Government of India andfrom the Bengali WordNet, which is developed at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. The paper reports the challenges and pitfalls of the work that have been closely observed during the experiment.