Combining heterogeneous classifiers for word-sense disambiguation

This paper discusses ensembles of simple but heterogeneous classifiers for word-sense disambiguation, examining the Stanford-CS224N system entered in the SENSEVAL-2 English lexical sample task. First-order classifiers are combined by a second-order classifier, which variously uses majority voting, weighted voting, or a maximum entropy model. While individual first-order classifiers perform comparably to middle-scoring teams ’ systems, the combination achieves high performance. We discuss trade-offs and empirical performance. Finally, we present an analysis of the combination, examining how ensemble performance depends on error independence and task difficulty.