One Sense per Collocation

Previous work [Gale, Church and Yarowsky, 1992] showed that with high probability a polysemous word has one sense per discourse. In this paper we show that for certain definitions of collocation, a polysemous word exhibits essentially only one sense per collocation. We test this empirical hypothesis for several definitions of sense and collocation, and discover that it holds with 90--99% accuracy for binary ambiguities. We utilize this property in a disambiguation algorithm that achieves precision of 92% using combined models of very local context.