The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural
Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways
of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces.
Distributional approaches --- meaning distributed representations that exploit
co-occurrence statistics of large corpora --- have proved popular and
successful across a number of tasks. However, natural language usually comes in
structures beyond the word level, with meaning arising not only from the
individual words but also the structure they are contained in at the phrasal or
sentential level. Modelling the compositional process by which the meaning of
an utterance arises from the meaning of its parts is an equally fundamental
task of NLP.
This dissertation explores methods for learning distributed semantic
representations and models for composing these into representations for larger
linguistic units. Our underlying hypothesis is that neural models are a
suitable vehicle for learning semantically rich representations and that such
representations in turn are suitable vehicles for solving important tasks in
natural language processing. The contribution of this thesis is a thorough
evaluation of our hypothesis, as part of which we introduce several new
approaches to representation learning and compositional semantics, as well as
multiple state-of-the-art models which apply distributed semantic
representations to various tasks in NLP.Comment: DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, Submitted and accepted in 201
