This paper presents a corpus-based approach to word sense disambiguation where a decision tree assigns a sense to an ambiguous word based on the bigrams that occur nearby. This approach is evaluated using the sense-tagged corpora from the 1998 SENSEVAL word sense disambiguation exercise. It is more accurate than the average results reported for 30 of 36 words, and is more accurate than the best results for 19 of 36 words.
The Naive Mix is a new supervised learning algorithm that is based on a sequential method for selecting probabilistic models. The usual objective of model selection is to find a single model that adequately characterizes the data in a training sample. However, during model selection a sequence of models is generated that consists of the best-fitting model at each level of model complexity. The Naive Mix utilizes this sequence of models to define a probabilistic model which is then used as a probabilistic classifier to perform word-sense disambiguation. The models in this sequence are restricted to the class of decomposable log-linear models. This class of models offers a number of computational advantages. Experiments disambiguating twelve different words show that a Naive Mix formulated with a forward sequential search and Akaike's Information Criteria rivals established supervised learning algorithms such as decision trees (C4.5), rule induction (CN2) and nearest-neighbor classification (PEBLS). 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 observed difference. We also discuss the role of bias in machine learning and its importance in explaining performance differences observed on specific problems.