First-order vs. higher-order modification in distributional semantics

  • Authors:

  • Gemma Boleda;Eva Maria Vecchi;Miquel Cornudella;Louise McNally

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas at Austin;University of Trento;Universitat Pompeu Fabra;Universitat Pompeu Fabra

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP-CoNLL '12 Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higher-order modifiers in the formal semantics tradition, raises interesting challenges for semantic composition in distributional semantic models. We contrast three types of adjectival modifiers -- intersectively used color terms (as in white towel, clearly first-order), subsectively used color terms (white wine, which have been modeled as both first- and higher-order), and intensional adjectives (former bassist, clearly higher-order) -- and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. In addition to opening up a new empirical domain for research on distributional semantics, our observations concerning the attested vectors for the different types of adjectives, the nouns they modify, and the resulting noun phrases yield insights into modification that have been little evident in the formal semantics literature to date.