Research into corpus-based semantics has focused on the development of ad hoc models that treat single tasks, or sets of closely related tasks, as unrelated challenges to be tackled by extracting different kinds of distributional information from the corpus. As an alternative to this “one task, one model” approach, the Distributional Memory framework extracts distributional information once and for all from the corpus, in the form of a set of weighted word-link-word tuples arranged into a third-order tensor. Different matrices are then generated from the tensor, and their rows and columns constitute natural spaces to deal with different semantic problems. In this way, the same distributional information can be shared across tasks such as modeling word similarity judgments, discovering synonyms, concept categorization, predicting selectional preferences of verbs, solving analogy problems, classifying relations between word pairs, harvesting qualia structures with patterns or example pairs, predicting the typical properties of concepts, and classifying verbs into alternation classes. Extensive empirical testing in all these domains shows that a Distributional Memory implementation performs competitively against task-specific algorithms recently reported in the literature for the same tasks, and against our implementations of several state-of-the-art methods. The Distributional Memory approach is thus shown to be tenable despite the constraints imposed by its multi-purpose nature.

Distributional semantics is a usage-based model of meaning, based on the assumption that the statistical distribution of linguistic items in context plays a key role in characterizing their semantic behavior. Distributional models build semantic representations by extracting co-occurrences from corpora and have become a mainstream research paradigm in computational linguistics. In this review, I present the state of the art in distributional semantics, focusing on its assets and limits as a model of meaning and as a method for semantic analysis.

In this paper, we introduce SLQS, a new entropy-based measure for the unsupervised identification of hypernymy and its directionality in Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs). SLQS is assessed through two tasks: (i.) identifying the hypernym in hyponym-hypernym pairs, and (ii.) discriminating hypernymy among various semantic relations. In both tasks, SLQS outperforms other state-of-the-art measures.

Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

This paper investigates the effects of data size and frequency range on distributional semantic models. We compare the performance of a number of representative models for several test settings over data of varying sizes, and over test items of various frequency. Our results show that neural network-based models underperform when the data is small, and that the most reliable model over data of varying sizes and frequency ranges is the inverted factorized model.

In this paper, we introduce EVALution 1.0, a dataset designed for the training and the evaluation of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs). This version consists of almost 7.5K tuples, instantiating several semantic relations between word pairs (including hypernymy, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy). The dataset is enriched with a large amount of additional information (i.e. relation domain, word frequency, word POS, word semantic field, etc.) that can be used for either filtering the pairs or performing an in-depth analysis of the results. The tuples were extracted from a combination of ConceptNet 5.0 and Word-Net 4.0, and subsequently filtered through automatic methods and crowdsourcing in order to ensure their quality. The dataset is freely downloadable 1. An extension in RDF format, including also scripts for data processing, is under development.

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