{"pk":28654,"title":"Representing lexical ambiguity in prototype models of lexical semantics","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We show, contrary to some recent claims in the literature, thatprototype distributional semantic models (DSMs) are capa-ble of representing multiple senses of ambiguous words, in-cluding infrequent meanings. We propose that word2vec con-tains a natural, model-internal way of operationalizing the dis-ambiguation process by leveraging the two sets of represen-tations word2vec learns, instead of just one as most workon this model does. We evaluate our approach on artifi-cial language simulations where other prototype DSMs havebeen shown to fail. We furthermore assess whether these re-sults scale to the disambiguation of naturalistic corpus exam-ples. We do so by replacing all instances of sampled pairsof words in a corpus with pseudo-homonym tokens, and test-ing whether models, after being trained on one half of the cor-pus, were able to disambiguate pseudo-homonyms on the ba-sis of their linguistic contexts in the second half of the cor-pus. We observe that word2vec well surpasses the baselineof always guessing the most frequent meaning to be the rightone. Moreover, it degrades gracefully: As words are moreunbalanced, the baseline is higher, and it is harder to surpassit; nonetheless, Word2vec succeeds at surpassing the baseline,even for pseudo-homonyms whose most frequent meaning ismuch more frequent than the other.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"distributed semantic models; word meaning; am-biguity; prototype models; exemplar models; word2vec"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3v88f307","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Barend","middle_name":"","last_name":"Beekhuizen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto, Mississauga","department":""},{"first_name":"Chen","middle_name":"Xuan","last_name":"Cui","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Suzanne","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stevenson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28654/galley/18525/download/"}]}