A Study of Metrics of Distance and Correlation Between Ranked Lists for Compositionality Detection

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors [1] or language models [2]), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity. We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered

Distributional Tensor Space Model of Natural Language Semantics

We propose a novel Distributional Tensor Space Model of natural language semantics employing 3d order tensors that accounts for order dependent word contexts and assigns to words characteristic matrices such that semantic composition can be realized in a linguistically and cognitively plausible way. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results for important tasks of linguistic semantics by using a relatively small text corpus and without any sophisticated preprocessing

D6.1: Technologies and Tools for Lexical Acquisition

This report describes the technologies and tools to be used for Lexical Acquisition in PANACEA. It includes descriptions of existing technologies and tools which can be built on and improved within PANACEA, as well as of new technologies and tools to be developed and integrated in PANACEA platform. The report also specifies the Lexical Resources to be produced. Four main areas of lexical acquisition are included: Subcategorization frames (SCFs), Selectional Preferences (SPs), Lexical-semantic Classes (LCs), for both nouns and verbs, and Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs)

A distributional investigation of German verbs

Diese Dissertation bietet eine empirische Untersuchung deutscher Verben auf der Grundlage statistischer Beschreibungen, die aus einem großen deutschen Textkorpus gewonnen wurden. In einem kurzen Überblick über linguistische Theorien zur lexikalischen Semantik von Verben skizziere ich die Idee, dass die Verbbedeutung wesentlich von seiner Argumentstruktur (der Anzahl und Art der Argumente, die zusammen mit dem Verb auftreten) und seiner Aspektstruktur (Eigenschaften, die den zeitlichen Ablauf des vom Verb denotierten Ereignisses bestimmen) abhängt. Anschließend erstelle ich statistische Beschreibungen von Verben, die auf diesen beiden unterschiedlichen Bedeutungsfacetten basieren. Insbesondere untersuche ich verbale Subkategorisierung, Selektionspräferenzen und Aspekt. Alle diese Modellierungsstrategien werden anhand einer gemeinsamen Aufgabe, der Verbklassifikation, bewertet. Ich zeige, dass im Rahmen von maschinellem Lernen erworbene Merkmale, die verbale lexikalische Aspekte erfassen, für eine Anwendung von Vorteil sind, die Argumentstrukturen betrifft, nämlich semantische Rollenkennzeichnung. Darüber hinaus zeige ich, dass Merkmale, die die verbale Argumentstruktur erfassen, bei der Aufgabe, ein Verb nach seiner Aspektklasse zu klassifizieren, gut funktionieren. Diese Ergebnisse bestätigen, dass diese beiden Facetten der Verbbedeutung auf grundsätzliche Weise zusammenhängen.This dissertation provides an empirical investigation of German verbs conducted on the basis of statistical descriptions acquired from a large corpus of German text. In a brief overview of the linguistic theory pertaining to the lexical semantics of verbs, I outline the idea that verb meaning is composed of argument structure (the number and types of arguments that co-occur with a verb) and aspectual structure (properties describing the temporal progression of an event referenced by the verb). I then produce statistical descriptions of verbs according to these two distinct facets of meaning: In particular, I examine verbal subcategorisation, selectional preferences, and aspectual type. All three of these modelling strategies are evaluated on a common task, automatic verb classification. I demonstrate that automatically acquired features capturing verbal lexical aspect are beneficial for an application that concerns argument structure, namely semantic role labelling. Furthermore, I demonstrate that features capturing verbal argument structure perform well on the task of classifying a verb for its aspectual type. These findings suggest that these two facets of verb meaning are related in an underlying way

Comparing word2vec and GloVe for Automatic Measurement of MWE Compositionality

This paper explores the use of word2vec and GloVe embeddings for unsupervised measurement of the semantic compositionality of MWE candidates. Through comparison with several human-annotated reference sets, we find word2vec to be substantively superior to GloVe for this task. We also find Simple English Wikipedia to be a poor-quality resource for compositionality assessment, but demonstrate that a sample of 10% of sentences in the English Wikipedia can provide a conveniently tractable corpus with only moderate reduction in the quality of outputs

German particle verbs: Compositionality at the syntax-semantics interface

Particle verbs represent a type of multi-word expression composed of a base verb and a particle. The meaning of the particle verb is often, but not always, derived from the meaning of the base verb, sometimes in quite complex ways. In this work, we computationally assess the levels of German particle verb compositionality, with the use of distributional semantic methods. Our results demonstrate that the prediction of particle verb compositionality is possible with statistical significance. Furthermore, we investigate properties of German particle verbs that are relevant for their compositionality: the particular subcategorization behavior of particle verbs and their corresponding base verbs, and the question in how far the verb particles can be attributed meaning by themselves, which they contribute to the particle verb

Exploiting multilingual lexical resources to predict MWE compositionality

Semantic idiomaticity is the extent to which the meaning of a multiword expression (MWE) cannot be predicted from the meanings of its component words. Much work in natural language processing on semantic idiomaticity has focused on compositionality prediction, wherein a binary or continuous-valued compositionality score is predicted for an MWE as a whole, or its individual component words. One source of information for making compositionality predictions is the translation of an MWE into other languages. This chapter extends two previously-presented studies – Salehi & Cook (2013) and Salehi et al. (2014) – that propose methods for predicting compositionality that exploit translation information provided by multilingual lexical resources, and that are applicable to many kinds of MWEs in a wide range of languages. These methods make use of distributional similarity of an MWE and its component words under translation into many languages, as well as string similarity measures applied to definitions of translations of an MWE and its component words. We evaluate these methods over English noun compounds, English verb-particle constructions, and German noun compounds. We show that the estimation of compositionality is improved when using translations into multiple languages, as compared to simply using distributional similarity in the source language. We further find that string similarity complements distributional similarity