Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter … 展开

Philosophers (and other users of logic) spend a lot of time and effort searching for and removing (or intentionally adding) ambiguity in arguments because it can lead to incorrect conclusions … 展开

In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool. Groucho Marx's classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for … 展开

Mathematical notation is a helpful tool that eliminates a lot of misunderstandings associated with natural language in physics and other sciences. Nonetheless, there are still some inherent ambiguities due to lexical, syntactic, and semantic reasons that persist in mathematical … 展开

In mathematics and logic, ambiguity can be considered to be an instance of the logical concept of underdetermination—for example, $${\displaystyle X=Y}$$ leaves open what the value of $${\displaystyle X}$$ is—while overdetermination, except when like 展开

Some languages have been created with the intention of avoiding ambiguity, especially lexical ambiguity. Lojban and Loglan are two related languages that have been created for this, focusing chiefly on syntactic ambiguity as well. The languages can be both spoken and … 展开

In structural biology, ambiguity has been recognized as a problem for studying protein conformations. The analysis of a protein three-dimensional structure consists in dividing the macromolecule into subunits called domains. The difficulty of this task arises from the … 展开