A Study on Compositional Semantics of Words in Distributional Spaces

This paper proposes two approaches to compositional semantics in distributional semantic spaces. Both approaches conceive the semantics of complex structures, such as phrases or sentences, as being other than the sum of its terms. Syntax is the plus used as a glue to compose words. The former kind of approach encodes information about syntactic dependencies directly into distributional spaces, the latter exploits compositional operators reflecting the syntactic role of words. We present a preliminary evaluation performed on GEMS 2011 “Compositional Semantics” dataset, with the aim of understanding the effects of these approaches when applied to simple word pairs of the kind Noun-Noun, Adjective-Noun and Verb-Noun. Experimental results corroborate our conjecture that exploiting syntax can lead to improved distributional models and compositional operators, and suggest new openings for future uses in real-application scenario