Combinatorial Disambiguation

The disambiguation of sentences is a combinatorial problem. This paper describes a method for treating it as such, directly, by adapting standard combinatorial search optimizations. Traditional disambiguation heuristics are applied but, instead of being embedded in individual decision procedures for specific types of ambiguities, they contribute to numerical weights that are considered by a single global optimizer. The result is increased power and simpler code. The method is being implemented for a machine translation project, but could be adapted to any natural language system.

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