We explore a novel application for interpreting semantic type coercions, motivated by insight into the role that perceptual affordances play in the selection of the semantic roles of artefactual nouns which are observed as arguments for verbs which would stereotypically select for objects of a different type. In order to simulate affordances, which we take to be direct perceptions of context-specific opportunities for action, we preform a distributional analysis dependency relationships between target words and their modifiers and adjuncts. We use these relationships as the basis for generating on-line transformations which project semantic subspaces in which the interpretations of coercive compositions are expected to emerge as salient word-vectors. We offer some preliminary examples of how this model operates on a dataset of sentences involving coercive interactions between verbs and objects specifically designed to evaluate this work.

We present a novel methodology involving mappings between different modes of semantic representation. We propose distributional semantic models as a mechanism for representing the kind of world knowledge inherent in the system of abstract symbols characteristic of a sophisticated community of language users. Then, motivated by insight from ecological psychology, we describe a model approximating affordances, by which we mean a language learner’s direct perception of opportunities for action in an environment. We present a preliminary experiment involving mapping between these two representational modalities, and propose that our methodology can become the basis for a cognitively inspired model of grounded language learning.