Does Free Word Order Hurt? Assessing the Practical Lexical Function Model for Croatian

Zoran Medić, Jan Šnajder, Sebastian Padó


Abstract
The Practical Lexical Function (PLF) model is a model of computational distributional semantics that attempts to strike a balance between expressivity and learnability in predicting phrase meaning and shows competitive results. We investigate how well the PLF carries over to free word order languages, given that it builds on observations of predicate-argument combinations that are harder to recover in free word order languages. We evaluate variants of the PLF for Croatian, using a new lexical substitution dataset. We find that the PLF works about as well for Croatian as for English, but demonstrate that its strength lies in modeling verbs, and that the free word order affects the less robust PLF variant.
Anthology ID:
S17-1014
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGSEM | SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S17-1014
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S17-1014
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zoran Medić, Jan Šnajder, and Sebastian Padó. 2017. Does Free Word Order Hurt? Assessing the Practical Lexical Function Model for Croatian. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017), pages 115–120, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does Free Word Order Hurt? Assessing the Practical Lexical Function Model for Croatian (Medić et al., *SEM 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/S17-1014.pdf
Poster:
 S17-1014.Poster.pdf