This paper presents context-group discrimination, a disambiguation algorithm based on clustering. Senses are interpreted as groups (or clusters) of similar contexts of the ambiguous word. Words, contexts, and senses are represented in Word Space, a high-dimensional, real-valued space in which closeness corresponds to semantic similarity. Similarity in Word Space is based on second-order co-occurrence: two tokens (or contexts) of the ambiguous word are assigned to the same sense cluster if the words they co-occur with in turn occur with similar words in a training corpus. The algorithm is automatic and unsupervised in both training and application: senses are induced from a corpus without labeled training insta,nces or other external knowledge sources. The paper demonstrates good performance of context-group discrimination for a sample of natural and artificial ambiguous words

In this paper, we present a new approach for word sense disambiguation (WSD) using an exemplar-based learning algorithm. This approach

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Introduction An impressive array of statistical methods have been developed for word sense identification. They range from dictionary-based approaches that rely on definitions (Vronis and Ide 1990; Wilks et al. 1993) to corpus-based approaches that use only word cooccurrence frequencies extracted from large textual corpora (Schfitze 1995; Dagan and Itai 1994). We have drawn on these two traditions, using corpus-based co-occurrence and the lexical knowledge base that is embodied in the WordNet lexicon. The two traditions complement each other. Corpus-based approaches have the advantage of being generally applicable to new texts, domains, and corpora without needing costly and perhaps error-prone parsing or semantic analysis. They require only training corpora in which the sense distinctions have been marked, but therein lies their weakness. Obtaining training materials for statistical methods is costly and timeconsuming --it is a "knowledge acquisition bottleneck" (Gale, Church, and Y

This paper describes an experimental comparison of seven different learning algorithms on the problem of learning to disambiguate the meaning of a word from context. The algorithms tested include statistical, neural-network, decision-tree, rule-based, and case-based classification techniques. The specific problem tested involves disambiguating six senses of the word "line" using the words in the current and proceeding sentence as context. The statistical and neural-network methods perform the best on this particular problem and we discuss a potential reason for this ob- served difference. We also discuss the role of bias in machine ]earning and its importance in explaining performance differences observed on specific problems.

The automatic disambiguation of word senses has been an interest and concern since the earliest days of computer treatment of language in the 1950's. Sense disambiguation is an “intermediate task ” (Wilks and Stevenson, 1996) which is not an end in itself, but rather is necessary at one level or another to accomplish most natural language processing tasks. It is

Resnik and Yarowsky (1997) made a set of observations about the state of the art in automatic word sense disambiguation and, motivated by those observations, offered several specific proposals regarding improved evaluation criteria, common training and testing resources, and the definition of sense inventories. Subsequent discussion of those proposals resulted in senseval, the first evaluation exercise for word sense disambiguation (Kilgarriff and Palmer forthcoming). This article is a revised and extended version of our 1997 workshop paper, reviewing its observations and proposals and discussing them in light of the senseval exercise. It also includes a new in-depth empirical study of translingually-based sense inventories and distance measures, using statistics collected from native-speaker annotations of 222 polysemous contexts across 12 languages. These data show that monolingual sense distinctions at most levels of granularity can be effectively captured by translations into some ...

This paper proposes an algorithm for word sense disambiguation based on a vector representation of word similarity derived from lexical co-occurrence. It differs from standard approaches by allowing for as fine grained distinctions as is warranted by the information at hand, rather than supposing a fixed number of senses per word, and by allowing for more than one sense to be assigned to a given word occur-rance. The algorithm is applied to the standard vectorspace information retrieval model and an evaluation is performed over the Category B TREC-1 corpus (WSJ subcollection). Results show that this sense disambiguation algorithm improves performance by between 7o and 1o on aver-age.

This paper describes an experimental com- parison of three unsupervised learning algorithms that distinguish the sense of an ambiguous word in untagged text.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a computational linguistics task likely to benefit from the tradition of combining different knowledge sources in artificial in telligence research. An important step in the exploration of this hypothesis is to determine which linguistic knowledge sources are most useful and whether their combination leads to improved results. We present a sense tagger which uses several knowledge sources. Tested accuracy exceeds 94 % on our evaluation corpus. Our system attempts to disambiguate all content words in running text rather than limiting itself to treating a restricted vocabulary of words. It is argued that this approach is more likely to assist the creation of practical systems. 1.