Combining Independent Knowledge Sources for Word Sense Disambiguation

Sense tagging, the automatic assignment of the appropriate sense from some lexicon to each of the words in a text, is a specialised instance of the general problem of word sense disambiguation. We discuss which recent word sense disambiguation algorithms are appropriate for sense tagging. It is our belief that sense tagging can be carried out effectively by combining several simple, independent, methods and we include the design of such a tagger. A prototype of this system has been implemented, correctly tagging 88% of polysemous word tokens in a small test set, providing evidence that our hypothesis is correct. 1 Sense Tagging There has been a tendency in word sense disambiguation (WSD hereafter) literature to carry out different disambiguation tasks and classify them all as WSD procedures. There are however, at least, three different levels of algorithm in WSD. The most specific of these are sense tagging procedures, these assign, to each word 1 in a text, its particular sense fr..