English

A Vector Space for Distributional Semantics for Entailment

Computation and Language 2016-07-14 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Distributional semantics creates vector-space representations that capture many forms of semantic similarity, but their relation to semantic entailment has been less clear. We propose a vector-space model which provides a formal foundation for a distributional semantics of entailment. Using a mean-field approximation, we develop approximate inference procedures and entailment operators over vectors of probabilities of features being known (versus unknown). We use this framework to reinterpret an existing distributional-semantic model (Word2Vec) as approximating an entailment-based model of the distributions of words in contexts, thereby predicting lexical entailment relations. In both unsupervised and semi-supervised experiments on hyponymy detection, we get substantial improvements over previous results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.03780,
  title  = {A Vector Space for Distributional Semantics for Entailment},
  author = {James Henderson and Diana Nicoleta Popa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.03780},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

To appear in Proc. 54th Annual Meeting of the Association Computational Linguistics (ACL 2016)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:53:38.694Z