text: 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.
  @cite_29: The representation of documents and queries as vectors in a high-dimensional space is well-established in information retrieval. The author proposes that the semantics of words and contexts in a text be represented as vectors. The dimensions of the space are words and the initial vectors are determined by the words occurring close to the entity to be represented, which implies that the space has several thousand dimensions (words). This makes the vector representations (which are dense) too cumbersome to use directly. Therefore, dimensionality reduction by means of a singular value decomposition is employed. The author analyzes the structure of the vector representations and applies them to word sense disambiguation and thesaurus induction. >
  @cite_23: This paper presents an unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations. The algorithm is based on two powerful constraints---that words tend to have one sense per discourse and one sense per collocation---exploited in an iterative bootstrapping procedure. Tested accuracy exceeds 96 .
summary: The features used in this work are complex and difficult to interpret and it isn't clear that this complexity is required. @cite_23 compares his method to @cite_29 and shows that for four words the former performs significantly better in distinguishing between two senses.