A number of proposals in the 1990s deliberately limited the extent to which they relied on domain and/or linguistic knowledge and reported promising results in knowledge-poor operational environments ( Dagan and Itai 1990 , 1991 ; Lappin and Leass 1994 ; Nasukawa 1994 ; Kennedy and Boguraev 1996 ; Williams , Harvey , and Preston 1996 ; Baldwin 1997 ; Mitkov 1996 , 1998b ) .