An Empirical Investigation into Grammatically Constrained Contexts in Predicting Distributional Similarity

The utility of syntactic dependencies in computing distributional similarity has not yet been fully investigated. Most re-search based on syntactically conditioned co-occurrences simply ignores the sali-ence of grammatical relations and effec-tively merges syntactic dependencies into one ‘context’. Through calculating distri-butional similarity, we design two ex-periments to explore and evaluate the four major types of contexts that are con-ditioned on grammatical relations. The consistent results show that the head-modifier dependency plays an important role in predicting the semantic features of nouns and verbs, in contrast to other de-pendencies.