Exploring Semantic Space. Word Space Models as a Research Tool for Lexical Semantics.

Word Space Models (WSMs) are a statistical-computational technique to compare the collocational behaviour of words in corpora on a large scale (See Turney & Pantel 2010 for an introduction). They are typically used to find similarities or differences in meaning between words, based on their shared or diverging contextual usage. Although primarily a computational technique, WSMs have been applied in Linguistics in diachronic lexical studies (Sagi et al., Peirsman et al. 2010b) or the study of regional variation (Peirsman et al. 2010a). In this paper, we want to show how WSMs can further aid the linguistic analysis of lexical semantics, provided that they are made accessible to lexicologists through a visualization of their underlying collocational similarity matrices. As a case study, we selected a set of Dutch near-synonyms referring to the concept COMPUTER SCREEN (beeldscherm, computerscherm, monitor) and we use a WSM to visualize how they “carve up ” the concept’s semantic space between them. From a large corpus stratified for region (Belgium/Netherlands) and register (quality vs popular newspapers), we construct a so-called token-level WSM (Schütze 1998) that captures the similarities and differences in contextual usage between 200 random occurrences (tokens) of the near-synonyms. This similarity matrix is visualised in 2 dimensions with Multi-Dimensional Scaling and presented in an interactive chart wit