@InProceedings{lebani-lenci:2016:CogALex-V,
  author    = {Lebani, Gianluca  and  Lenci, Alessandro},
  title     = {"Beware the Jabberwock, dear reader!" Testing the distributional reality of construction semantics},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex - V)},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {8--18},
  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.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-5302}
}