Abstract
Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts, and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.- Anthology ID:
- W17-2810
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Vancouver, Canada
- Editors:
- Mohit Bansal, Cynthia Matuszek, Jacob Andreas, Yoav Artzi, Yonatan Bisk
- Venue:
- RoboNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 76–85
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W17-2810
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W17-2810
- Cite (ACL):
- Li Lucy and Jon Gauthier. 2017. Are Distributional Representations Ready for the Real World? Evaluating Word Vectors for Grounded Perceptual Meaning. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics, pages 76–85, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Are Distributional Representations Ready for the Real World? Evaluating Word Vectors for Grounded Perceptual Meaning (Lucy & Gauthier, RoboNLP 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/W17-2810.pdf
- Code
- lucy3/Graphs-Embeddings