Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns

Attributes such as SIZE, WEIGHT or COLOR are at the core of conceptualization, i.e., the formal representation of entities or events in the real world. In natural language, formal attributes find their counterpart in attribute nouns which can be used in order to generalize over individual properties (e.g., 'big' or 'small' in case of SIZE, 'blue' or 'red' in case of COLOR). In order to ascribe such properties to entities or events, adjective-noun phrases are a very frequent linguistic pattern (e.g., 'a blue shirt', 'a big lion'). In these constructions, attribute meaning is conveyed only implicitly, i.e., without being overtly realized at the phrasal surface. This thesis is about modeling attribute meaning in adjectives and nouns in a distributional semantics framework. This implies the acquisition of meaning representations for adjectives, nouns and their phrasal combination from corpora of natural language text in an unsupervised manner, without tedious handcrafting or manual annotation efforts. These phrase representations can be used to predict implicit attribute meaning from adjective-noun phrases -- a problem which will be referred to as attribute selection throughout this thesis. The approach to attribute selection proposed in this thesis is framed in structured distributional models. We model adjective and noun meanings as distinct semantic vectors in the same semantic space spanned by attributes as dimensions of meaning. Based on these word representations, we make use of vector composition operations in order to construct a phrase representation from which the most prominent attribute(s) being expressed in the compositional semantics of the adjective-noun phrase can be selected by means of an unsupervised selection function. This approach not only accounts for the linguistic principle of compositionality that underlies adjective-noun phrases, but also avoids inherent sparsity issues that result from the fact that the relationship between an adjective, a noun and a particular attribute is rarely explicitly observed in corpora. The attribute models developed in this thesis aim at a reconciliation of the conflict between specificity and sparsity in distributional semantic models. For this purpose, we compare various instantiations of attribute models capitalizing on pattern-based and dependency-based distributional information as well as attribute-specific latent topics induced from a weakly supervised adaptation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Moreover, we propose a novel framework of distributional enrichment in order to enhance structured vector representations by incorporating additional lexical information from complementary distributional sources. In applying distributional enrichment to distributional attribute models, we follow the idea to augment structured representations of adjectives and nouns to centroids of their nearest neighbours in semantic space, while keeping the principle of meaning representation along structured, interpretable dimensions intact. We evaluate our attribute models in several experiments on the attribute selection task framed for various attribute inventories, ranging from a thoroughly confined set of ten core attributes up to a large-scale set of 260 attributes. Our results show that large-scale attribute selection from distributional vector representations that have been acquired in an unsupervised setting is a challenging endeavor that can be rendered more feasible by restricting the semantic space to confined subsets of attributes. Beyond quantitative evaluation, we also provide a thorough analysis of performance factors (based on linear regression) that influence the effectiveness of a distributional attribute model for attribute selection. This investigation reflects strengths and weaknesses of the model and sheds light on the impact of a variety of linguistic factors involved in attribute selection, e.g., the relative contribution of adjective and noun meaning. In conclusion, we consider our work on attribute selection as an instructive showcase for applying methods from distributional semantics in the broader context of knowledge acquisition from text in order to alleviate issues that are related to implicitness and sparsity

Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns

Hartung M. Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns. Heidelberg: Universität Heidelberg; 2015

Knowledge Modelling and Learning through Cognitive Networks

One of the most promising developments in modelling knowledge is cognitive network science, which aims to investigate cognitive phenomena driven by the networked, associative organization of knowledge. For example, investigating the structure of semantic memory via semantic networks has illuminated how memory recall patterns influence phenomena such as creativity, memory search, learning, and more generally, knowledge acquisition, exploration, and exploitation. In parallel, neural network models for artificial intelligence (AI) are also becoming more widespread as inferential models for understanding which features drive language-related phenomena such as meaning reconstruction, stance detection, and emotional profiling. Whereas cognitive networks map explicitly which entities engage in associative relationships, neural networks perform an implicit mapping of correlations in cognitive data as weights, obtained after training over labelled data and whose interpretation is not immediately evident to the experimenter. This book aims to bring together quantitative, innovative research that focuses on modelling knowledge through cognitive and neural networks to gain insight into mechanisms driving cognitive processes related to knowledge structuring, exploration, and learning. The book comprises a variety of publication types, including reviews and theoretical papers, empirical research, computational modelling, and big data analysis. All papers here share a commonality: they demonstrate how the application of network science and AI can extend and broaden cognitive science in ways that traditional approaches cannot

Exploiting World Knowledge inDiscourse Processing – A Comparison of Feature -Based and Inference-Based Approaches–

Tohoku University乾健太郎課

Acquisition de liens sémantiques à partir d'éléments de mise en forme des textes: exploitation des structures énumératives

The past decade witnessed significant advances in the field of relation extraction from text, facilitating the building of lexical or semantic resources. However, the methods proposed so far (supervised learning, kernel methods, distant supervision, etc.) don't fully exploit the texts: they are usually applied at the sentential level and they don't take into account the layout and the formatting of texts.In such a context, this thesis aims at expanding those methods and makes them layout-aware for extracting relations expressed beyond sentence boundaries. For this purpose, we rely on the semantics conveyed by typographical (bullets, emphasis, etc.) and dispositional (visual indentations, carriage returns, etc.) features. Those features often substitute purely discursive formulations. In particular, the study reported here is dealing with the relations carried by the vertical enumerative structures. Although they display discontinuities between their various components, the enumerative structures can be dealt as a whole at the semantic level. They form textual structures prone to hierarchical relations.This study was divided into two parts. (i) The first part describes a model representing the hierarchical structure of documents. This model is falling within the theoretical framework representing the textual architecture: an abstraction of the layout and the formatting, as well as a strong connection with the rhetorical structure are achieved. However, our model focuses primarily on the efficiency of the analysis process rather than on the expressiveness of the representation. A bottom-up method intended for building automatically this model is presented and evaluated on a corpus of PDF documents.(ii) The second part aims at integrating this model into the process of relation extraction. In particular, we focused on vertical enumerative structures. A multidimensional typology intended for characterizing those structures was established and used into an annotation task. Thanks to corpus-based observations, we proposed a two-step method, by supervised learning, for qualifying the nature of the relation and identifying its arguments. The evaluation of our method showed that exploiting the formatting and the layout of documents, in combination with standard lexico-syntactic features, improves those two tasks.Ces dernières années de nombreux progrès ont été faits dans le domaine de l'extraction de relations à partir de textes, facilitant ainsi la construction de ressources lexicales ou sémantiques. Cependant, les méthodes proposées (apprentissage supervisé, méthodes à noyaux, apprentissage distant, etc.) n’exploitent pas tout le potentiel des textes : elles ont généralement été appliquées à un niveau phrastique, sans tenir compte des éléments de mise en forme.Dans ce contexte, l'objectif de cette thèse est d'adapter ces méthodes à l'extraction de relations exprimées au-delà des frontières de la phrase. Pour cela, nous nous appuyons sur la sémantique véhiculée par les indices typographiques (puces, emphases, etc.) et dispositionnels (indentations visuelles, retours à la ligne, etc.), qui complètent des formulations strictement discursives. En particulier, nous étudions les structures énumératives verticales qui, bien qu'affichant des discontinuités entre leurs différents composants, présentent un tout sur le plan sémantique. Ces structures textuelles sont souvent révélatrices de relations hiérarchiques. Notre travail est divisé en deux parties. (i) La première partie décrit un modèle pour représenter la structure hiérarchique des documents. Ce modèle se positionne dans la suite des modèles théoriques proposés pour rendre compte de l'architecture textuelle : une abstraction de la mise en forme et une connexion forte avec la structure rhétorique sont faites. Toutefois, notre modèle se démarque par une perspective d'analyse automatique des textes. Nous en proposons une implémentation efficace sous la forme d'une méthode ascendante et nous l'évaluons sur un corpus de documents PDF. (ii) La seconde partie porte sur l'intégration de ce modèle dans le processus d'extraction de relations. Plus particulièrement, nous nous sommes focalisés sur les structures énumératives verticales. Un corpus a été annoté selon une typologie multi-dimensionnelle permettant de caractériser et de cibler les structures énumératives verticales porteuses de relations utiles à la création de ressources. Les observations faites en corpus ont conduit à procéder en deux étapes par apprentissage supervisé pour analyser ces structures : qualifier la relation puis en extraire les arguments. L'évaluation de cette méthode montre que l'exploitation de la mise en forme, combinée à un faisceau d'indices lexico-syntaxiques, améliore les résultats

Term-driven E-Commerce

Die Arbeit nimmt sich der textuellen Dimension des E-Commerce an. Grundlegende Hypothese ist die textuelle Gebundenheit von Information und Transaktion im Bereich des elektronischen Handels. Überall dort, wo Produkte und Dienstleistungen angeboten, nachgefragt, wahrgenommen und bewertet werden, kommen natürlichsprachige Ausdrücke zum Einsatz. Daraus resultiert ist zum einen, wie bedeutsam es ist, die Varianz textueller Beschreibungen im E-Commerce zu erfassen, zum anderen können die umfangreichen textuellen Ressourcen, die bei E-Commerce-Interaktionen anfallen, im Hinblick auf ein besseres Verständnis natürlicher Sprache herangezogen werden

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia