Contextualized Word Embeddings Encode Aspects of Human-Like Word Sense Knowledge

Sathvik Nair, Mahesh Srinivasan, Stephan Meylan


Abstract
Understanding context-dependent variation in word meanings is a key aspect of human language comprehension supported by the lexicon. Lexicographic resources (e.g., WordNet) capture only some of this context-dependent variation; for example, they often do not encode how closely senses, or discretized word meanings, are related to one another. Our work investigates whether recent advances in NLP, specifically contextualized word embeddings, capture human-like distinctions between English word senses, such as polysemy and homonymy. We collect data from a behavioral, web-based experiment, in which participants provide judgments of the relatedness of multiple WordNet senses of a word in a two-dimensional spatial arrangement task. We find that participants’ judgments of the relatedness between senses are correlated with distances between senses in the BERT embedding space. Specifically, homonymous senses (e.g., bat as mammal vs. bat as sports equipment) are reliably more distant from one another in the embedding space than polysemous ones (e.g., chicken as animal vs. chicken as meat). Our findings point towards the potential utility of continuous-space representations of sense meanings.
Anthology ID:
2020.cogalex-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci, Enrico Santus
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
129–141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cogalex-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sathvik Nair, Mahesh Srinivasan, and Stephan Meylan. 2020. Contextualized Word Embeddings Encode Aspects of Human-Like Word Sense Knowledge. In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon, pages 129–141, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contextualized Word Embeddings Encode Aspects of Human-Like Word Sense Knowledge (Nair et al., CogALex 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cogalex-1.16.pdf