We investigate the relationship between lexical spaces and contextually-defined conceptual spaces, offering applications to creative concept discovery. We define a computational method for discovering members of concepts based on semantic spaces: starting with a standard distributional model derived from corpus co-occurrence statistics, we dynamically select characteristic dimensions associated...

Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higherorder 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, whic...

Despite the number of NLP studies dedicated to thematic fit estimation, little attention has been paid to the related task of composing and updating verb argument expectations. The few exceptions have mostly modeled this phenomenon with structured distributional models, implicitly assuming a similarly structured representation of events. Recent experimental evidence, however, suggests that huma...

In this talk, I discuss the ability of compositional distributional semantics to model adjective modification. I present three studies that explore the degree to which semantic intuitions are grounded in the distributional representations of adjective-noun phrases, as well as provide insight into various linguistic phenomena by extracting unsupervised cues from these distributional representati...

English. The inclusion of semantic features in the stylometric analysis of literary texts appears to be poorly investigated. In this work, we experiment with the application of Distributional Semantics to a corpus of Italian literature to test if words distribution can convey stylistic cues. To verify our hypothesis, we have set up an Authorship Attribution experiment. Indeed, the results we ha...

We report on initial work on bridging the conceptto-reference gap using distributional semantics. Specifically, we aim at predicting properties of countries, using distributional vectors to infer database information. Our results are highly encouraging, since we achieve an error reduction of 30% over the baseline and are not far from the upper bound.

The weekend effect is the tendency for Monday stock returns to be negative. The paper reports a posterior odds evaluation of the day-of-the-week and weekend effect that largely reverses earlier findings. The interaction of large sample sizes and fixed significance level hypothesis testing is identified as the likely source of disagreements between p-values and posterior probabilities. Analysis ...

Conceptual representations in language processing employ both linguistic distributional and embodied information. Here, we aim to demonstrate the roles of these two components in metaphor processing. The linguistic component is captured by linguistic distributional frequency (LDF), that is, how often the constituent words appear together in context. The embodied component, on the other hand, re...

We present the components of a processing chain for the creation, visualization, and validation of lexical resources (formed of terms and relations between terms). The core of the chain is a component for building lexical networks relying on Harris’ distributional hypothesis applied on the syntactic dependencies produced by the French parser FRMG on large corpora. Another important aspect conce...

In this paper, we explore the problem of identifying substitute relationship between food pairs from real-world food consumption data as the first step towards the healthier food recommendation. Our method is inspired by the distributional hypothesis in linguistics. Specifically, we assume that foods that are consumed in similar contexts are more likely to be similar dietarily. For example, a t...