  We present an automatic method for weighting the contributions of preference
functions used in disambiguation. Initial scaling factors are derived as the
solution to a least-squares minimization problem, and improvements are then
made by hill-climbing. The method is applied to disambiguating sentences in the
ATIS (Air Travel Information System) corpus, and the performance of the
resulting scaling factors is compared with hand-tuned factors. We then focus on
one class of preference function, those based on semantic lexical collocations.
Experimental results are presented showing that such functions vary
considerably in selecting correct analyses. In particular we define a function
that performs significantly better than ones based on mutual information and
likelihood ratios of lexical associations.
