This paper presents a new method for resolving lexical (word sense) ambiguities inherent in natural language sentences. The Sentence Analyzer (SENA) was developed to resolve such ambiguities by using constraints and example-based preferences. The ambiguities are packed into a single dependency structure, and grammatical and lexical constraints are applied to it in order to reduce the degree of ambiguity. The application of constraints is realized by a very effective constraint-satisfaction technique. Remaining ambiguities are resolved by the use of preferences calculated from an example-base, which is a set of fully parsed word-to-word dependencies acquired semi-automatically from on-line dictionaries.