Abstract
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms. We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., ‘a beautiful three days’). We show that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation. Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.14
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 242–261
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.14
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.14
- Cite (ACL):
- Gabriella Chronis, Kyle Mahowald, and Katrin Erk. 2023. A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 242–261, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces (Chronis et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2023.acl-long.14.pdf