This paper discusses research on distinguishing word meanings in the context of information retrieval systems. We conducted experiments with three sources of evidence for making these distinctions: morphology, part-of-speech, and phrases. We have focused on the distinction between h o m o n y m y and polysemy (unrelated vs. related meanings). Our results support the need to distinguish h o m o n y m y and p o l y semy. We found: 1) grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance, 2) that more than half of all words in a dictionary that differ.
