What Statistical NLP can do for us
Disambiguation strategies that rely on hand-coding produce a knowledge acquisition bottleneck and perform poorly on naturally occurring text.
A Statistical NLP approach seeks to solve these problems by automatically learning lexical and structural preferences from corpora. In particular, Statistical NLP recognizes that there is a lot of information in the relationships between words.
The use of statistics offers a good solution to the ambiguity problem: statistical models are robust, generalize well, and behave gracefully in the presence of errors and new data.