Natural language semantics has recently sought to combine the complementary strengths of formal and distributional approaches meaning. However, given fundamentally different ‘representational currency’ underlying these approaches—models world versus linguistic co-occurrence—their unification proven extremely difficult. Here, we define Distributional Formal Semantics, which integrates distributi...

Automatic event location extraction from text plays a crucial role in many applications such as infectious disease surveillance and natural disaster monitoring. The fundamental limitation of previous work such as SpaceEval is the limited scope of extraction, targeting only at locations that are explicitly stated in a syntactic structure. This leads to missing a lot of implicit information infer...

Context-predicting models (more commonly known as embeddings or neural language models) are the new kids on the distributional semantics block. Despite the buzz surrounding these models, the literature is still lacking a systematic comparison of the predictive models with classic, count-vector-based distributional semantic approaches. In this paper, we perform such an extensive evaluation, on a...

We study a nonlinear equation with an elliptic operator having degenerate coercivity. We prove the existence of a W 1,1 0 (Ω) solution which is distributional or entropic, according to the growth assumptions on a lower order term in divergence form. To Ildefonso: But of all these friends and lovers There is no one compares with you [9]

This paper investigates the role of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) into a Question Answering (QA) system. Our purpose is to exploit DSMs for answer re-ranking in QuestionCube, a framework for building QA systems. DSMs model words as points in a geometric space, also known as semantic space. Words are similar if they are close in that space. Our idea is that DSMs approaches can help to co...

We investigate how supervision (in the form of explicit instruction) interacts with distributional learning in the acquisition of the perception of a novel vowel contrast in a second language. An experiment with non-Dutch-speaking Bulgarians reveals that listeners who receive bimodal distributional training without explicit instruction can acquire new Dutch vowel contrasts, and that listeners w...

Givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) is one of the central notions in the formal pragmatic literature discussing the organization of discourse. In this paper, we explore where distributional semantics can help address the gap between the linguistic insights into the formal pragmatic notion of Givenness and its implementation in computational

We introduce DISSECT, a toolkit to build and explore computational models of word, phrase and sentence meaning based on the principles of distributional semantics. The toolkit focuses in particular on compositional meaning, and implements a number of composition methods that have been proposed in the literature. Furthermore, DISSECT can be useful to researchers and practitioners who need models...