An Empirical Evaluation of Knowledge Sources and Learning Algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we evaluate a variety of knowledge sources and supervised learning algorithms for word sense disambiguation on SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-1 data. Our knowledge sources include the part-of-speech of neighboring words, single words in the surrounding context, local collocations, and syntactic relations. The learning algorithms evaluated include Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, AdaBoost, and decision tree algorithms. We present empirical results showing the relative contribution of the component knowledge sources and the different learning algorithms. In particular, using all of these knowledge sources and SVM (i.e., a single learning algorithm) achieves accuracy higher than the best official scores on both SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-1 test data.