Verbs play a critical role in the meaning of sentences, but these ubiquitous words have received little attention in recent distributional semantics research. We introduce SimVerb-3500, an evaluation resource that provides human ratings for the similarity of 3,500 verb pairs. SimVerb-3500 covers all normed verb types from the USF free-association database, providing at least three examples for every VerbNet class. This broad coverage facilitates detailed analyses of how syntactic and semantic phenomena together influence human understanding of verb meaning. Further, with significantly larger development and test sets than existing benchmarks, SimVerb-3500 enables more robust evaluation of representation learning architectures and promotes the development of methods tailored to verbs. We hope that SimVerb-3500 will enable a richer understanding of the diversity and complexity of verb semantics and guide the development of systems that can effectively represent and interpret this meaning.
A natural way to evaluate representation quality is by judging the similarity of representations assigned to similar words. The most popular evaluation sets at present consist of word pairs with similarity ratings produced by human annotators. In some existing evaluation sets pairs are scored for relatedness which has some overlap with similarity. SimVerb-3500 focuses on similarity as this is a more focused semantic relation that seems to yield a higher agreement between human annotators. For a broader discussion see @cite_28 . Nevertheless, we find that all available datasets of this kind are insufficient for judging verb similarity due to their small size or narrow coverage of verbs.
@cite_28
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We present SimLex-999, a gold standard resource for evaluating distributional semantic models that improves on existing resources in several important ways. First, in contrast to gold standards such as WordSim-353 and MEN, it explicitly quantifies similarity rather than association or relatedness so that pairs of entities that are associated but not actually similar Freud, psychology have a low rating. We show that, via this focus on similarity, SimLex-999 incentivizes the development of models with a different, and arguably wider, range of applications than those which reflect conceptual association. Second, SimLex-999 contains a range of concrete and abstract adjective, noun, and verb pairs, together with an independent rating of concreteness and free association strength for each pair. This diversity enables fine-grained analyses of the performance of models on concepts of different types, and consequently greater insight into how architectures can be improved. Further, unlike existing gold standard evaluations, for which automatic approaches have reached or surpassed the inter-annotator agreement ceiling, state-of-the-art models perform well below this ceiling on SimLex-999. There is therefore plenty of scope for SimLex-999 to quantify future improvements to distributional semantic models, guiding the development of the next generation of representation-learning architectures.