Variants of Vector Space Reductions for Predicting the Compositionality of English Noun Compounds

Pegah Alipoor, Sabine Schulte im Walde


Abstract
Predicting the degree of compositionality of noun compounds such as “snowball” and “butterfly” is a crucial ingredient for lexicography and Natural Language Processing applications, to know whether the compound should be treated as a whole, or through its constituents, and what it means. Computational approaches for an automatic prediction typically represent and compare compounds and their constituents within a vector space and use distributional similarity as a proxy to predict the semantic relatedness between the compounds and their constituents as the compound’s degree of compositionality. This paper provides a systematic evaluation of vector-space reduction variants across kinds, exploring reductions based on part-of-speech next to and also in combination with Principal Components Analysis using Singular Value and word2vec embeddings. We show that word2vec and nouns only dimensionality reductions are the most successful and stable vector space variants for our task.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.539
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4379–4387
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.539
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pegah Alipoor and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2020. Variants of Vector Space Reductions for Predicting the Compositionality of English Noun Compounds. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4379–4387, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Variants of Vector Space Reductions for Predicting the Compositionality of English Noun Compounds (Alipoor & Schulte im Walde, LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.539.pdf