Statistical Sense Disambiguation with Relatively Small Corpora Using Dictionary Definitions

Corpus-based sense disambiguation methods, like most other statistical NLP approaches, suffer from the problem of data sparseness. In this paper, we describe an approach which overcomes this problem using dictionary definitions. Using the definitionbased conceptual co-occurrence data collected from the relatively small Brown corpus, our sense disambiguation system achieves an average accuracy comparable to human performance given the same contextual information.