Abstract
The decision list algorithm is one of the most successful algorithms for classification problems in natural language processing. The most important part of the decision list algorithm is the calculation of reliability for each rule, hence the estimation of probability for each contextual evidence. However, the majority of research efforts using decision lists do not think much of the estimation method. We propose an estimation method based on Bayesian learning which gives well-founded smoothing and better use of prior information on each type of contextual evidences. Experimental results obtained using Senseval-1 data set and Japanese pseudowords show that our method makes probability estimation more precise, leading to improvement of classification performance of the decision list algorithm.
