Spatial Versus Graphical Representation of Distributional Semantic Knowledge

Spatial distributional semantic models represent word meanings in a vector space. While able to model many basic semantic tasks, they are limited in many ways, such as their inability to represent multiple kinds of relations in a single semantic space and to directly leverage indirect relations between two lexical representations. To address these limitations, we propose a distributional graphical model that encodes lexical distributional data in a graphical structure and uses spreading activation for determining the plausibility of word sequences. We compare our model to existing spatial and graphical models by systematically varying parameters that contributing to dimensions of theoretical interest in semantic modeling. In order to be certain about what the models should be able to learn, we trained each model on an artificial corpus describing events in an artificial world simulation containing experimentally controlled verb–noun selectional preferences. The task used for model evaluation requires recovering observed selectional preferences and inferring semantically plausible but never observed verb–noun pairs. We show that the distributional graphical model performed better than all other models. Further, we argue that the relative success of this model comes from its improved ability to access the different orders of spatial representations with the spreading activation on the graph, enabling the model to infer the plausibility of noun–verb pairs unobserved in the training data. The model integrates classical ideas of representing semantic knowledge in a graph with spreading activation and more recent trends focused on the extraction of lexical distributional data from large natural language corpora.