Abstract

Vector representations of words have heralded a transformational approach to classical problems in NLP; the most popular example is word2vec. However, a single vector does not suffice to model the polysemous nature of many (frequent) words, i.e., words with multiple meanings. In this paper, we propose a three-fold approach for unsupervised polysemy modeling: (a) context representations, (b) sense induction and disambiguation and (c) lexeme (as a word and sense pair) representations. A key feature of our work is the finding that a sentence containing a target word is well represented by a low rank subspace, instead of a point in a vector space. We then show that the subspaces associated with a particular sense of the target word tend to intersect over a line (one-dimensional subspace), which we use to disambiguate senses using a clustering algorithm that harnesses the Grassmannian geometry of the representations. The disambiguation algorithm, which we call K-Grassmeans, leads to a procedure to label the different senses of the target word in the corpus - yielding lexeme vector representations, all in an unsupervised manner starting from a large (Wikipedia) corpus in English. Apart from several prototypical target (word,sense) examples and a host of empirical studies to intuit and justify the various geometric representations, we validate our algorithms on standard sense induction and disambiguation datasets and present new state-of-the-art results.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2017
Event5th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2017 - Toulon, France
Duration: Apr 24 2017Apr 26 2017

Conference

Conference5th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2017
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityToulon
Period4/24/174/26/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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