English

Geometry of Compositionality

Computation and Language 2016-11-30 v1

Abstract

This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors. Experiments show that the proposed method is competitive with state of the art and displays high accuracy in context-specific compositionality detection of a variety of natural language phenomena (idiomaticity, sarcasm, metaphor) for different datasets in multiple languages. The key insight is to connect compositionality to a curious geometric property of word embeddings, which is of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.09799,
  title  = {Geometry of Compositionality},
  author = {Hongyu Gong and Suma Bhat and Pramod Viswanath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.09799},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:08:26.271Z