Disambiguation by Association as a Practical Method: Experiments and Findings

Word sense disambiguation is vital to any form of text analysis which involves word meanings. However it is a very difficult task to solve accurately. We have replicated two well known methods due to Lesk (1986) and Ide and Veronis (1990), and have conducted trials using both methods on a corpus of 100 sentences. We also carried out experiments to determine whether the use of syntactic tagging would improve results. There are three principal findings of this work. Firstly, syntactic tagging improves the performance of all the disambiguation algorithms. Secondly, the Ide and Veronis method of depth 2 performs slightly better than the Lesk method. Thirdly, the performance of a particular algorithm is heavily dependent on the way in which it is measured.