Machine learning and natural language processing

In this report, some collaborative work between the fields of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is presented. The document is structured in two parts. The first part includes a superficial but comprehensive survey covering the state-of-the-art of machine learning techniques applied to natural language learning tasks. In the second part, a particular problem, namely Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), is studied in more detail. In doing so, four algorithms for supervised learning, which belong to different families, are compared in a benchmark corpus for the WSD task. Both qualitative and quantitative conclusions are drawn.Postprint (published version