This paper describes an experimental comparison of three unsupervised learning algorithms that distinguish the sense of an ambiguous word in untagged text. The methods described in this paper, McQuitty's similarity analysis, Ward's minimum-variance method, and the EM algorithm, assign each instance of an ambiguous word to a known sense definition based solely on the values of automatically identifiable features in text. These methods and feature sets are found to be more successful in disambiguating nouns rather than adjectives or verbs. Overall, the most accurate of these procedures is McQuitty's similarity analysis in combination with a high dimensional feature set.
A more recent bootstrapping approach is described in @cite_23 . This algorithm requires a small number of training examples to serve as a seed. There are a variety of options discussed for automatically selecting seeds; one is to identify collocations that uniquely distinguish between senses. For plant , the collocations manufacturing plant and living plant make such a distinction. Based on 106 examples of manufacturing plant and 82 examples of living plant this algorithm is able to distinguish between two senses of plant for 7,350 examples with 97 percent accuracy. Experiments with 11 other words using collocation seeds result in an average accuracy of 96 percent.
@cite_23
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This paper presents an unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations. The algorithm is based on two powerful constraints---that words tend to have one sense per discourse and one sense per collocation---exploited in an iterative bootstrapping procedure. Tested accuracy exceeds 96 .