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Unsupervised word sense disambiguation rivaling supervised methods

Published 1 January 1995Open access
David Yarowsky
Citations2,408
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TL;DR

An unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations.

Abstract

This paper presents an unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations. The algorithm is based on two powerful constraints---that words tend to have one sense per discourse and one sense per collocation---exploited in an iterative bootstrapping procedure. Tested accuracy exceeds 96%.

Keywords

Computer Science