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Incremental Composition in Distributional Semantics

Matthew Purver Orcid Logo, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh Orcid Logo, Ruth Kempson Orcid Logo, Gijs Wijnholds, Julian Hough

Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Volume: 30, Issue: 2, Pages: 379 - 406

Swansea University Author: Julian Hough

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Abstract

Despite the incremental nature of Dynamic Syntax (DS), the semantic grounding of it remains that of predicate logic, itself grounded in set theory, so is poorly suited to expressing the rampantly context-relative nature of word meaning, and related phenomena such as incremental judgements of similar...

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Published in: Journal of Logic, Language and Information
ISSN: 0925-8531 1572-9583
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2021
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa64926
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Abstract: Despite the incremental nature of Dynamic Syntax (DS), the semantic grounding of it remains that of predicate logic, itself grounded in set theory, so is poorly suited to expressing the rampantly context-relative nature of word meaning, and related phenomena such as incremental judgements of similarity needed for the modelling of disambiguation. Here, we show how DS can be assigned a compositional distributional semantics which enables such judgements and makes it possible to incrementally disambiguate language constructs using vector space semantics. Building on a proposal in our previous work, we implement and evaluate our model on real data, showing that it outperforms a commonly used additive baseline. In conclusion, we argue that these results set the ground for an account of the non-determinism of lexical content, in which the nature of word meaning is its dependence on surrounding context for its construal.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Issue: 2
Start Page: 379
End Page: 406