Translating and Evolving: Towards a Model of Language Change in DisCoCat

The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning developed by Coecke et al. (2010) has been successful in modeling various aspects of meaning. However, it fails to model the fact that language can change. We give an approach to DisCoCat that allows us to represent language models and translations between them, enabling us to describe translations from one language to another, or changes within the same language. We unify the product space representation given in (Coecke et al., 2010) and the functorial description in (Kartsaklis et al., 2013), in a way that allows us to view a language as a catalogue of meanings. We formalize the notion of a lexicon in DisCoCat, and define a dictionary of meanings between two lexicons. All this is done within the framework of monoidal categories. We give examples of how to apply our methods, and give a concrete suggestion for compositional translation in corpora.Comment: In Proceedings CAPNS 2018, arXiv:1811.0270

Towards logical negation for compositional distributional semantics

The categorical compositional distributional model of meaning gives the composition of words into phrases and sentences pride of place. However, it has so far lacked a model of logical negation. This paper gives some steps towards providing this operator, modelling it as a version of projection onto the subspace orthogonal to a word. We give a small demonstration of the operators performance in a sentence entailment task

Composing Conversational Negation

Negation in natural language does not follow Boolean logic and is therefore inherently difficult to model. In particular, it takes into account the broader understanding of what is being negated. In previous work, we proposed a framework for the negation of words that accounts for 'worldly context'. This paper extends that proposal now accounting for the compositional structure inherent in language within the DisCoCirc framework. We compose the negations of single words to capture the negation of sentences. We also describe how to model the negation of words whose meanings evolve in the text.Comment: In Proceedings ACT 2021, arXiv:2211.0110