This paper describes an experimental comparison of three unsupervised
learning algorithms that distinguish the sense of an ambiguous word in untagged
text. The methods described in this paper, McQuitty's similarity analysis,
Ward's minimum-variance method, and the EM algorithm, assign each instance of
an ambiguous word to a known sense definition based solely on the values of
automatically identifiable features in text. These methods and feature sets are
found to be more successful in disambiguating nouns rather than adjectives or
verbs. Overall, the most accurate of these procedures is McQuitty's similarity
analysis in combination with a high dimensional feature set.Comment: 11 pages, latex, uses aclap.st