1,412 research outputs found
A Context-theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics
Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in
many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no
general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We
present a framework for natural language semantics in which words, phrases and
sentences are all represented as vectors, based on a theoretical analysis which
assumes that meaning is determined by context.
In the theoretical analysis, we define a corpus model as a mathematical
abstraction of a text corpus. The meaning of a string of words is assumed to be
a vector representing the contexts in which it occurs in the corpus model.
Based on this assumption, we can show that the vector representations of words
can be considered as elements of an algebra over a field. We note that in
applications of vector spaces to representing meanings of words there is an
underlying lattice structure; we interpret the partial ordering of the lattice
as describing entailment between meanings. We also define the context-theoretic
probability of a string, and, based on this and the lattice structure, a degree
of entailment between strings.
We relate the framework to existing methods of composing vector-based
representations of meaning, and show that our approach generalises many of
these, including vector addition, component-wise multiplication, and the tensor
product.Comment: Submitted to Computational Linguistics on 20th January 2010 for
revie
Distributional Sentence Entailment Using Density Matrices
Categorical compositional distributional model of Coecke et al. (2010)
suggests a way to combine grammatical composition of the formal, type logical
models with the corpus based, empirical word representations of distributional
semantics. This paper contributes to the project by expanding the model to also
capture entailment relations. This is achieved by extending the representations
of words from points in meaning space to density operators, which are
probability distributions on the subspaces of the space. A symmetric measure of
similarity and an asymmetric measure of entailment is defined, where lexical
entailment is measured using von Neumann entropy, the quantum variant of
Kullback-Leibler divergence. Lexical entailment, combined with the composition
map on word representations, provides a method to obtain entailment relations
on the level of sentences. Truth theoretic and corpus-based examples are
provided.Comment: 11 page
Don't Blame Distributional Semantics if it can't do Entailment
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational
Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such
as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in
state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical
status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and
cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it
be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic
expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully
adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects
of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and
certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests
on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression
meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative
intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers
do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its
own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the
role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition,
its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on
Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019), Gothenburg, Swede
Learning to distinguish hypernyms and co-hyponyms
This work is concerned with distinguishing different semantic relations which exist between distributionally similar words. We compare a novel approach based on training a linear Support Vector Machine on pairs of feature vectors with state-of-the-art methods based on distributional similarity. We show that the new supervised approach does better even when there is minimal information about the target words in the training data, giving a 15% reduction in error rate over unsupervised approaches
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