Distributional Semantics in the Real World: Building Word Vector Representations from a Truth-Theoretic Model

Elizaveta Kuzmenko, Aurélie Herbelot


Abstract
Distributional semantics models (DSMs) are known to produce excellent representations of word meaning, which correlate with a range of behavioural data. As lexical representations, they have been said to be fundamentally different from truth-theoretic models of semantics, where meaning is defined as a correspondence relation to the world. There are two main aspects to this difference: a) DSMs are built over corpus data which may or may not reflect ‘what is in the world’; b) they are built from word co-occurrences, that is, from lexical types rather than entities and sets. In this paper, we inspect the properties of a distributional model built over a set-theoretic approximation of ‘the real world’. To achieve this, we take the annotation a large database of images marked with objects, attributes and relations, convert the data into a representation akin to first-order logic and build several distributional models using various combinations of features. We evaluate those models over both relatedness and similarity datasets, demonstrating their effectiveness in standard evaluations. This allows us to conclude that, despite prior claims, truth-theoretic models are good candidates for building graded lexical representations of meaning.
Anthology ID:
W19-0503
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Short Papers
Month:
May
Year:
2019
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Vera Demberg
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16–23
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0503
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-0503
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elizaveta Kuzmenko and Aurélie Herbelot. 2019. Distributional Semantics in the Real World: Building Word Vector Representations from a Truth-Theoretic Model. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Short Papers, pages 16–23, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distributional Semantics in the Real World: Building Word Vector Representations from a Truth-Theoretic Model (Kuzmenko & Herbelot, IWCS 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0503.pdf