Facing the facts of fake: a distributional semantics and corpus annotation approach

International audienceFake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called 'privative' adjective, one which, in other words, allows the proposition that '(a) fake x is not (an) x'. This study tests the hypothesis that the contexts of an adjective-noun combination are more different from the contexts of the noun when the adjective is such a 'privative' one than when it is an ordinary (subsective) one. We here use 'embeddings', that is, dense vector representations based on word co-occurrences in a large corpus, which in our study is the entire English Wikipedia as it was in 2013. Comparing the cosine distance between the adjective-noun bigram and single noun embeddings across two sets of adjectives, privative and ordinary ones, we fail to find a noticeable difference. However, we contest that fake is an across-the-board privative adjective, since a fake article, for instance, is most definitely still an article. We extend a recent proposal involving the noun's qualia roles (how an entity is made, what it consists of, what it is used for, etc.) and propose several interpretational types of fake-noun combinations, some but not all of which are privative. These interpretations, which we assign manually to the 100 most frequent fake-noun combinations in the Wikipedia corpus, depend to a large extent on the meaning of the noun, as combinations with similar interpretations tend to involve nouns that are linked in a distributions-based network. When we restrict our focus to the privative uses of fake only, we do detect a slightly enlarged difference between fake + noun bigram and noun distributions compared to the previously obtained average difference between adjective + noun bigram and noun distributions. This result contrasts with negative or even opposite findings reported in the literature

First-order vs. higher-order modification in distributional semantics

Comunicació presentada a Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, celebrada del 12 al 14 de juliol de 2012, a Jeju Island, Korea.Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higher-order modifiers in the formal semantics tradition, raises interesting challenges for semantic composition in distributional semantic models. We contrast three types of adjectival modifiers -- intersectively used color terms (as in white towel, clearly first-order), subsectively used color terms (white wine, which have been modeled as both first- and higher-order), and intensional adjectives (former bassist, clearly higher-order) -- and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. In addition to opening up a new empirical domain for research on distributional semantics, our observations concerning the attested vectors for the different types of adjectives, the nouns they modify, and the resulting noun phrases yield insights into modification that have been little evident in the formal semantics literature to date.This research was funded by the Spanish MICINN (FFI2010-09464-E, FFI2010-15006, TIN2009-14715-C04-04), the Catalan AGAUR (2010BPA00070), and the EU (PASCAL2; FP7-ICT-216886). Eva Maria Vecchi was partially funded by ERC Starting Grant 283554

First-order vs. higher-order modification in distributional semantics

Comunicació presentada a Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, celebrada del 12 al 14 de juliol de 2012, a Jeju Island, Korea.Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higher-order modifiers in the formal semantics tradition, raises interesting challenges for semantic composition in distributional semantic models. We contrast three types of adjectival modifiers -- intersectively used color terms (as in white towel, clearly first-order), subsectively used color terms (white wine, which have been modeled as both first- and higher-order), and intensional adjectives (former bassist, clearly higher-order) -- and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. In addition to opening up a new empirical domain for research on distributional semantics, our observations concerning the attested vectors for the different types of adjectives, the nouns they modify, and the resulting noun phrases yield insights into modification that have been little evident in the formal semantics literature to date.This research was funded by the Spanish MICINN (FFI2010-09464-E, FFI2010-15006, TIN2009-14715-C04-04), the Catalan AGAUR (2010BPA00070), and the EU (PASCAL2; FP7-ICT-216886). Eva Maria Vecchi was partially funded by ERC Starting Grant 283554

Approximation in Morphology

This Special Issue "Approximation in Morphology" has been collated from peer-reviewed papers presented at the ApproxiMo 'discontinuous' workshop (2022), which was held online between December 2021 and May 2022, and organized by Francesca Masini (Bologna), Muriel Norde (Berlin) and Kristel Van Goethem (Louvain)