In the 1970s, WSD was a subtask of semantic interpretation systems developed within the field of artificial intelligence, starting with Wilks' preference semantics.
The 2000s saw supervised techniques reach a plateau in accuracy, and so attention has shifted to coarser-grained senses, domain adaptation, semi-supervised and unsupervised corpus-based systems, combinations of different methods, and the return of knowledge-based systems via graph-based methods.