“Beware the Jabberwock, dear reader!” Testing the distributional reality of construction semantics

Gianluca Lebani, Alessandro Lenci


Abstract
Notwithstanding the success of the notion of construction, the computational tradition still lacks a way to represent the semantic content of these linguistic entities. Here we present a simple corpus-based model implementing the idea that the meaning of a syntactic construction is intimately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. It is a two-step process, that starts by identifying the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and building their distributional vectors. We then calculated the weighted centroid of these vectors in order to derive the distributional signature of a construction. In order to assess the goodness of our approach, we replicated the priming effect described by Johnson and Golberg (2013) as a function of the semantic distance between a construction and its prototypical verbs. Additional support for our view comes from a regression analysis showing that our distributional information can be used to model behavioral data collected with a crowdsourced elicitation experiment.
Anthology ID:
W16-5302
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex - V)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Michael Zock, Alessandro Lenci, Stefan Evert
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
8–18
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-5302
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gianluca Lebani and Alessandro Lenci. 2016. “Beware the Jabberwock, dear reader!” Testing the distributional reality of construction semantics. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex - V), pages 8–18, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
“Beware the Jabberwock, dear reader!” Testing the distributional reality of construction semantics (Lebani & Lenci, CogALex 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-5302.pdf