Feature2Vec: Distributional semantic modelling of human property knowledge

Steven Derby, Paul Miller, Barry Devereux


Abstract
Feature norm datasets of human conceptual knowledge, collected in surveys of human volunteers, yield highly interpretable models of word meaning and play an important role in neurolinguistic research on semantic cognition. However, these datasets are limited in size due to practical obstacles associated with exhaustively listing properties for a large number of words. In contrast, the development of distributional modelling techniques and the availability of vast text corpora have allowed researchers to construct effective vector space models of word meaning over large lexicons. However, this comes at the cost of interpretable, human-like information about word meaning. We propose a method for mapping human property knowledge onto a distributional semantic space, which adapts the word2vec architecture to the task of modelling concept features. Our approach gives a measure of concept and feature affinity in a single semantic space, which makes for easy and efficient ranking of candidate human-derived semantic properties for arbitrary words. We compare our model with a previous approach, and show that it performs better on several evaluation tasks. Finally, we discuss how our method could be used to develop efficient sampling techniques to extend existing feature norm datasets in a reliable way.
Anthology ID:
D19-1595
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5853–5859
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1595
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1595
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Derby, Paul Miller, and Barry Devereux. 2019. Feature2Vec: Distributional semantic modelling of human property knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5853–5859, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Feature2Vec: Distributional semantic modelling of human property knowledge (Derby et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1595.pdf
Code
 stevend94/Feature2Vec