First-order vs. higher-order modification in distributional semantics

Comunicació presentada a Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, celebrada del 12 al 14 de juliol de 2012, a Jeju Island, Korea.Adjectival modification, particularly by expressions that have been treated as higher-order modifiers in the formal semantics tradition, raises interesting challenges for semantic composition in distributional semantic models. We contrast three types of adjectival modifiers -- intersectively used color terms (as in white towel, clearly first-order), subsectively used color terms (white wine, which have been modeled as both first- and higher-order), and intensional adjectives (former bassist, clearly higher-order) -- and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. In addition to opening up a new empirical domain for research on distributional semantics, our observations concerning the attested vectors for the different types of adjectives, the nouns they modify, and the resulting noun phrases yield insights into modification that have been little evident in the formal semantics literature to date.This research was funded by the Spanish MICINN (FFI2010-09464-E, FFI2010-15006, TIN2009-14715-C04-04), the Catalan AGAUR (2010BPA00070), and the EU (PASCAL2; FP7-ICT-216886). Eva Maria Vecchi was partially funded by ERC Starting Grant 283554