Recent work has demonstrated that state-of-the-art word embedding models require different context types to produce high-quality representations for different word classes such as adjectives (A), verbs (V), and nouns (N). This paper is concerned with identifying contexts useful for learning A V N-specific representations. We introduce a simple yet effective framework for selecting class-specific context configurations that yield improved representations for each class. We propose an automatic A* style selection algorithm that effectively searches only a fraction of the large configuration space. The results on predicting similarity scores for the A, V, and N subsets of the benchmarking SimLex-999 evaluation set indicate that our method is useful for each class: the improvements are 6 (A), 6 (V), and 5 (N) over the best previously proposed context type for each class. At the same time, the model trains on only 14 (A), 26.2 (V), and 33.6 (N) of all dependency-based contexts, resulting in much shorter training time.
Traditionally, vector-based semantic space models use word co-occurrence counts from large corpora to represent lexical meaning. In this article we present a novel framework for constructing semantic spaces that takes syntactic relations into account. We introduce a formalization for this class of models, which allows linguistic knowledge to guide the construction process. We evaluate our framework on a range of tasks relevant for cognitive science and natural language processing: semantic priming, synonymy detection, and word sense disambiguation. In all cases, our framework obtains results that are comparable or superior to the state of the art. Context representations are a key element in distributional models of word meaning. In contrast to typical representations based on neighboring words, a recently proposed approach suggests to represent a context of a target word by a substitute vector, comprising the potential fillers for the target word slot in that context. In this work we first propose a variant of substitute vectors, which we find particularly suitable for measuring context similarity. Then, we propose a novel model for representing word meaning in context based on this context representation. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art results on lexical substitution tasks in an unsupervised setting. We investigate paradigmatic representations of word context in the domain of unsupervised syntactic category acquisition. Paradigmatic representations of word context are based on potential substitutes of a word in contrast to syntagmatic representations based on properties of neighboring words. We compare a bigram based baseline model with several paradigmatic models and demonstrate significant gains in accuracy. Our best model based on Euclidean co-occurrence embedding combines the paradigmatic context representation with morphological and orthographic features and achieves 80 many-to-one accuracy on a 45-tag 1M word corpus. We present a novel word level vector representation based on symmetric patterns (SPs). For this aim we automatically acquire SPs (e.g., “X and Y”) from a large corpus of plain text, and generate vectors where each coordinate represents the cooccurrence in SPs of the represented word with another word of the vocabulary. Our representation has three advantages over existing alternatives: First, being based on symmetric word relationships, it is highly suitable for word similarity prediction. Particularly, on the SimLex999 word similarity dataset, our model achieves a Spearman’s score of 0.517, compared to 0.462 of the state-of-the-art word2vec model. Interestingly, our model performs exceptionally well on verbs, outperforming stateof-the-art baselines by 20.2‐41.5 . Second, pattern features can be adapted to the needs of a target NLP application. For example, we show that we can easily control whether the embeddings derived from SPs deem antonym pairs (e.g. (big,small)) as similar or dissimilar, an important distinction for tasks such as word classification and sentiment analysis. Finally, we show that a simple combination of the word similarity scores generated by our method and by word2vec results in a superior predictive power over that of each individual model, scoring as high as 0.563 in Spearman’s on SimLex999. This emphasizes the differences between the signals captured by each of the models. Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002; Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part-of-speech-tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that approximate classical relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept-internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter-concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property-based approach. While continuous word embeddings are gaining popularity, current models are based solely on linear contexts. In this work, we generalize the skip-gram model with negative sampling introduced by to include arbitrary contexts. In particular, we perform experiments with dependency-based contexts, and show that they produce markedly different embeddings. The dependencybased embeddings are less topical and exhibit more functional similarity than the original skip-gram embeddings.