Hierarchical Decision Lists for Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper describes a supervised algorithm for word sensedisambiguation based on hierarchies of decision lists. This algorithmsupports a useful degree of conditional branching while minimizing thetraining data fragmentation typical of decision trees. Classificationsare based on a rich set of collocational, morphological and syntacticcontextual features, extracted automatically from training data andweighted sensitive to the nature of the feature and feature class. Thealgorithm is evaluated comprehensively in the SENSEVAL framework,achieving the top performance of all participating supervised systems onthe 36 test words where training data is available.