Abstract: Disclosed herein is a computer implemented method and system for word sense disambiguation in a natural language sentence. The natural language sentence is parsed for identifying possible parts of speech for each term and identifying possible phrase structures. Terms comprising one or more linguistic roles are identified. The possible sense combinations for the terms with linguistic roles are identified. Emergent categories are applied to identify possible valid senses for each of the terms with identified linguistic roles. Linguistic role pairs are identified from among the terms identified with linguistic roles. The correspondence functions with the correspondence function types matching the identified linguistic role pairs are identified from an emergent categories database. The pair-wise senses for each term are compared with the identified linguistic roles to identify the possible sense combinations.