Is this a Child, a Girl or a Car? Exploring the Contribution of Distributional Similarity to Learning Referential Word Meanings

Sina Zarrieß, David Schlangen


Abstract
There has recently been a lot of work trying to use images of referents of words for improving vector space meaning representations derived from text. We investigate the opposite direction, as it were, trying to improve visual word predictors that identify objects in images, by exploiting distributional similarity information during training. We show that for certain words (such as entry-level nouns or hypernyms), we can indeed learn better referential word meanings by taking into account their semantic similarity to other words. For other words, there is no or even a detrimental effect, compared to a learning setup that presents even semantically related objects as negative instances.
Anthology ID:
E17-2014
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–91
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2014
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sina Zarrieß and David Schlangen. 2017. Is this a Child, a Girl or a Car? Exploring the Contribution of Distributional Similarity to Learning Referential Word Meanings. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 86–91, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is this a Child, a Girl or a Car? Exploring the Contribution of Distributional Similarity to Learning Referential Word Meanings (Zarrieß & Schlangen, EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2014.pdf
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