{"pk":27942,"title":"What Company Do Semantically Ambiguous Words Keep? Insights from Distrobutional Word Vectors","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The diversity of a word’s contexts affects its acquisition andprocessing. Can differences between word types such asmonosemes (unambiguous words), polysemes (multiple relatedsenses), and homonyms (multiple unrelated meanings) be re-lated to distributional properties of these words? We tested fortraces of number and relatedness of meaning in vector repre-sentations by comparing the distance between words of eachtype and vector representations of various “contexts”: their dic-tionary definitions (an extreme disambiguating context), theiruse in film subtitles (a natural context), and their semanticneighbours in vector space (a vector-space-internal context).Whereas dictionary definitions reveal a three-way split betweenour word types, the other two contexts produced a two-way splitbetween ambiguous and unambiguous words. These inconsis-tencies align with some discrepancies in behavioural studiesand present a paradox regarding how models learn meaningrelatedness despite natural contexts seemingly lacking suchrelatedness. We argue that viewing ambiguity as a continuumcould resolve many of these issues.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"lexical/semantic ambiguity; homonymy; polysemy; vector space models; contextual diversity"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16p860bz","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Barend","middle_name":"","last_name":"Beekhuizen","name_suffix":"","institution":"U of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Sasa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Milie","name_suffix":"","institution":"U of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Blair","middle_name":"C","last_name":"Armstrong","name_suffix":"","institution":"U of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Suzanne","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stevenson","name_suffix":"","institution":"U of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27942/galley/17580/download/"}]}