From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

KnowNet: A proposal for building highly connected and dense knowledge bases from the web

This paper presents a new fully automatic method for building highly dense and accurate knowledge bases from existing semantic resources. Basically, the method uses a wide-coverage and accurate nowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation algorithm to assign the most appropriate senses to large sets of topically related words acquired from the web. KnowNet, the resulting knowledge-base which connects large sets of semantically-related concepts is a major step towards the autonomous acquisition of knowledge from raw corpora. In fact, KnowNet is several times larger than any available knowledge resource encoding relations between synsets, and the knowledge KnowNet contains outperform any other resource when is empirically evaluated in a common multilingual framework.Peer ReviewedPreprint (author's version

Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

Knowledge-rich Word Sense Disambiguation rivaling supervised systems

One of the main obstacles to high-performance Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In this paper, we present a methodology to automatically extend WordNet with large amounts of semantic relations from an encyclopedic resource, namely Wikipedia. We show that, when provided with a vast amount of high-quality semantic relations, simple knowledge-lean disambiguation algorithms compete with state-of-the-art supervised WSD systems in a coarse-grained all-words setting and outperform them on gold-standard domain-specific datasets. © 2010 Association for Computational Linguistics

Definitions in ontologies

Definitions vary according to context of use and target audience. They must be made relevant for each context to fulfill their cognitive and linguistic goals. This involves adapting their logical structure, type of content, and form to each context of use. We examine from these perspectives the case of definitions in ontologies