Overall, the distributional similarity based method (sim) performs much better than the other methods.
, w n } and target word v the Naïve Bayes probability estimation for the conditional probability of a word v may occur in a given a context C is as follows: where P(w|v) is the probability that a word w appears in the context of a sentence containing v and correspondingly P(w|¬v) is the probability that w appears in a sentence not containing v. The probability estimates were obtained from the processed BNC corpus as follows: |w appears in sentences containing v| |words in sentences containing v| P(w|¬v) = |w occurs in sentences not containing v| |words in sentences not containing v| To avoid 0 probabilities these estimates were smoothed by adding a small constant to all counts and normalizing accordingly.