Why is penguin more similar to polar bear than to sea gull? Analyzing conceptual knowledge in distributional models

Pia Sommerauer


Abstract
What do powerful models of word mean- ing created from distributional data (e.g. Word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013) BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and ELMO (Peters et al., 2018)) represent? What causes words to be similar in the semantic space? What type of information is lacking? This thesis proposal presents a framework for investigating the information encoded in distributional semantic models. Several analysis methods have been suggested, but they have been shown to be limited and are not well understood. This approach pairs observations made on actual corpora with insights obtained from data manipulation experiments. The expected outcome is a better understanding of (1) the semantic information we can infer purely based on linguistic co-occurrence patterns and (2) the potential of distributional semantic models to pick up linguistic evidence.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-srw.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Shruti Rijhwani, Jiangming Liu, Yizhong Wang, Rotem Dror
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
134–142
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.18
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.18
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pia Sommerauer. 2020. Why is penguin more similar to polar bear than to sea gull? Analyzing conceptual knowledge in distributional models. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 134–142, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why is penguin more similar to polar bear than to sea gull? Analyzing conceptual knowledge in distributional models (Sommerauer, ACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.18.pdf
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