A crash blossom is a sentence or phrase, often a headline, whose wording creates serious ambiguity. Natural language understanding systems must resolve such ambiguity to avoid incorrect interpretations.
A sentence or phrase with an ambiguous meaning. Crash blossoms present a significant problem in natural language understanding. For example, the headline Red Tape Holds Up Skyscraper is a crash blossom because an NLU model could interpret the headline literally or figuratively. Just to clarify that mysterious headline: - Red Tape could refer to either of the following: - An adhesive - Excessive bureaucracy - Holds Up could refer to either of the following: - Structural support - Delays