@inproceedings{lebani-lenci-2016-beware,
    title = "{``}Beware the Jabberwock, dear reader!{''} Testing the distributional reality of construction semantics",
    author = "Lebani, Gianluca  and
      Lenci, Alessandro",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon ({C}og{AL}ex - V)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2016",
    address = "Osaka, Japan",
    publisher = "The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/W16-5302",
    pages = "8--18",
    abstract = "Notwithstanding the success of the notion of construction, the computational tradition still lacks a way to represent the semantic content of these linguistic entities. Here we present a simple corpus-based model implementing the idea that the meaning of a syntactic construction is intimately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. It is a two-step process, that starts by identifying the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and building their distributional vectors. We then calculated the weighted centroid of these vectors in order to derive the distributional signature of a construction. In order to assess the goodness of our approach, we replicated the priming effect described by Johnson and Golberg (2013) as a function of the semantic distance between a construction and its prototypical verbs. Additional support for our view comes from a regression analysis showing that our distributional information can be used to model behavioral data collected with a crowdsourced elicitation experiment.",
}