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<Paper uid="P99-1020">
  <Title>A Method for Word Sense Disambiguation of Unrestricted Text</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an open
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> problem in Natural Language Processing. Its solution impacts other tasks such as discourse, reference resolution, coherence, inference and others. WSD methods can be broadly classified into three types: 1. WSD that make use of the information provided by machine readable dictionaries (Cowie et al., 1992), (Miller et al., 1994), (Agirre and Rigau, 1995), (Li et al., 1995), (McRoy, 1992); 2. WSD that use information gathered from training on a corpus that has already been semantically disambiguated (supervised training methods) (Gale et al., 1992), (Ng and Lee, 1996); 3. WSD that use information gathered from raw corpora (unsupervised training methods) (Yarowsky, 1995) (Resnik, 1997).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> There are also hybrid methods that combine several sources of knowledge such as lexicon information, heuristics, collocations and others (McRoy, 1992) (Bruce and Wiebe, 1994) (Ng and Lee, 1996) (Rigau et al., 1997).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Statistical methods produce high accuracy results for small number of preselected words. A lack of widely available semantically tagged corpora almost excludes supervised learning methods. A possible solution for automatic acquisition of sense tagged corpora has been presented in (Mihalcea and Moldovan, 1999), but the corpora acquired with this method has not been yet tested for statistical disambiguation of words. On the other hand, the disambiguation using unsupervised methods has the disadvantage that the senses are not well defined. None of the statistical methods disambiguate adjectives or adverbs so far.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In this paper, we introduce a method that attempts to disambiguate all the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in a text, using the senses provided in WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). To our knowledge, there is only one other method, recently reported, that disambiguates unrestricted words in texts (Stetina et al., 1998).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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