Robust Handling of Polysemy via Sparse Representations

Abhijit Mahabal, Dan Roth, Sid Mittal


Abstract
Words are polysemous and multi-faceted, with many shades of meanings. We suggest that sparse distributed representations are more suitable than other, commonly used, (dense) representations to express these multiple facets, and present Category Builder, a working system that, as we show, makes use of sparse representations to support multi-faceted lexical representations. We argue that the set expansion task is well suited to study these meaning distinctions since a word may belong to multiple sets with a different reason for membership in each. We therefore exhibit the performance of Category Builder on this task, while showing that our representation captures at the same time analogy problems such as “the Ganga of Egypt” or “the Voldemort of Tolkien”. Category Builder is shown to be a more expressive lexical representation and to outperform dense representations such as Word2Vec in some analogy classes despite being shown only two of the three input terms.
Anthology ID:
S18-2031
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Jonathan Berant, Alessandro Lenci
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
265–275
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-2031
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S18-2031
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhijit Mahabal, Dan Roth, and Sid Mittal. 2018. Robust Handling of Polysemy via Sparse Representations. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 265–275, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Robust Handling of Polysemy via Sparse Representations (Mahabal et al., *SEM 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-2031.pdf