In this report, some collaborative work between the fields of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is presented. The document is structured in two parts. The first part includes a superficial but comprehensive survey covering the state-of-the-art of machine learning techniques applied to natural language learning tasks. In the second part, a particular problem, namely Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), is studied in more detail. In doing so, four algorithms for supervised learning, which belong to different families, are compared in a benchmark corpus for the WSD task. Both qualitative and quantitative conclusions are drawn.