What are the Goals of Distributional Semantics?

Guy Emerson


Abstract
Distributional semantic models have become a mainstay in NLP, providing useful features for downstream tasks. However, assessing long-term progress requires explicit long-term goals. In this paper, I take a broad linguistic perspective, looking at how well current models can deal with various semantic challenges. Given stark differences between models proposed in different subfields, a broad perspective is needed to see how we could integrate them. I conclude that, while linguistic insights can guide the design of model architectures, future progress will require balancing the often conflicting demands of linguistic expressiveness and computational tractability.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.663
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7436–7453
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.663
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.663
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guy Emerson. 2020. What are the Goals of Distributional Semantics?. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7436–7453, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What are the Goals of Distributional Semantics? (Emerson, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.663.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929194
Data
MultiNLISNLISemEval-2018 Task-9