Current computational models of argument constructions typically represent their semantic content with hand-made formal structures. Here we present a distributional model implementing the idea that the meaning of a construction is in- timately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. First, we identify the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and build their distributional vectors. We then calculate the weighted centroid of these vectors in order to derive the distributional signature of a construction. In or- der 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 in- formation can be used to model behavioral data collected with a crowdsourced elicitation experiment.

Current computational models of argument constructions typically represent their semantic content with hand-made formal structures. Here we present a distributional model implementing the idea that the meaning of a construction is intimately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. First, we identify the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and build their distributional vectors. We then calculate 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.

Modelling the Meaning of Argument Constructions with Distributional Semantics

Lebani Gianluca;
2017-01-01

Abstract

Current computational models of argument constructions typically represent their semantic content with hand-made formal structures. Here we present a distributional model implementing the idea that the meaning of a construction is intimately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. First, we identify the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and build their distributional vectors. We then calculate 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.
2017
The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3715942
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