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Decision Lists for Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Application to Accent Restoration in Spanish and French

David Yarowsky
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Abstract

This paper presents a statistical decision procedure for lexical ambiguity resolution. The algorithm exploits both local syntactic patterns and more distant collocational evidence, generating an efficient, effective, and highly perspicuous recipe for resolving a given ambiguity. By identifying and utilizing only the single best disambiguating evidence in a target context, the algorithm avoids the problematic complex modeling of statistical dependencies. Although directly applicable to a wide class of ambiguities, the algorithm is described and evaluated in a realistic case study, the problem of restoring missing accents in Spanish and French text.

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David Yarowsky. 1994-06-23. Decision Lists for Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Application to Accent Restoration in Spanish and French. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9406034

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