4,034 research outputs found
Syntactic Topic Models
The syntactic topic model (STM) is a Bayesian nonparametric model of language
that discovers latent distributions of words (topics) that are both
semantically and syntactically coherent. The STM models dependency parsed
corpora where sentences are grouped into documents. It assumes that each word
is drawn from a latent topic chosen by combining document-level features and
the local syntactic context. Each document has a distribution over latent
topics, as in topic models, which provides the semantic consistency. Each
element in the dependency parse tree also has a distribution over the topics of
its children, as in latent-state syntax models, which provides the syntactic
consistency. These distributions are convolved so that the topic of each word
is likely under both its document and syntactic context. We derive a fast
posterior inference algorithm based on variational methods. We report
qualitative and quantitative studies on both synthetic data and hand-parsed
documents. We show that the STM is a more predictive model of language than
current models based only on syntax or only on topics
Redefining part-of-speech classes with distributional semantic models
This paper studies how word embeddings trained on the British National Corpus
interact with part of speech boundaries. Our work targets the Universal PoS tag
set, which is currently actively being used for annotation of a range of
languages. We experiment with training classifiers for predicting PoS tags for
words based on their embeddings. The results show that the information about
PoS affiliation contained in the distributional vectors allows us to discover
groups of words with distributional patterns that differ from other words of
the same part of speech.
This data often reveals hidden inconsistencies of the annotation process or
guidelines. At the same time, it supports the notion of `soft' or `graded' part
of speech affiliations. Finally, we show that information about PoS is
distributed among dozens of vector components, not limited to only one or two
features
Secondary predication in Russian
The paper makes two contributions to semantic typology of secondary predicates. It provides an explanation of the fact that Russian has no resultative secondary predicates, relating this explanation to the interpretation of secondary predicates in English. And it relates depictive secondary predicates in Russian, which usually occur in the instrumental case, to other uses of the instrumental case in Russian, establishing here, too, a difference to English concerning the scope of the secondary predication phenomenon
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