We present a novel approach to the word sense disambiguation problem which makes use of corpus-based evidence combined with background knowledge. Employing an inductive logic programming algorithm, the approach generates expressive disambiguation rules which exploit several knowledge sources and can also model relations between them. The approach is evaluated in two tasks: identification of the correct translation for a set of highly ambiguous verbs in EnglishPortuguese translation and disambiguation of verbs from the Senseval-3 lexical sample task. .
