Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis and Quantifications: Probing for Hypernymy in Functional Distributional Semantics

Chun Lo, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng, Guy Emerson


Abstract
Functional Distributional Semantics (FDS) models the meaning of words by truth-conditional functions. This provides a natural representation for hypernymy but no guarantee that it can be learnt when FDS models are trained on a corpus. In this paper, we probe into FDS models and study the representations learnt, drawing connections between quantifications, the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis (DIH), and the variational-autoencoding objective of FDS model training. Using synthetic data sets, we reveal that FDS models learn hypernymy on a restricted class of corpus that strictly follows the DIH. We further introduce a training objective that both enables hypernymy learning under the reverse of the DIH and improves hypernymy detection from real corpora.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.784
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14625–14637
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.784
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chun Lo, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng, and Guy Emerson. 2024. Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis and Quantifications: Probing for Hypernymy in Functional Distributional Semantics. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14625–14637, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis and Quantifications: Probing for Hypernymy in Functional Distributional Semantics (Lo et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.784.pdf