Representing Verbs with Rich Contexts: an Evaluation on Verb Similarity

Emmanuele Chersoni1, Enrico Santus2, Alessandro Lenci3, Philippe Blache4, Chu-Ren Huang5
1Aix-Marseille University, 2The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 3University of Pisa, 4LPL CNRS, 5The Hong Kong Polytechnic Universiy


Abstract

Several studies on sentence processing suggest that the mental lexicon keeps track of the mutual expectations between words. Current DSMs, however, represent context words as separate features, thereby loosing important information for word expectations, such as word interrelations. In this paper, we present a DSM that addresses this issue by defining verb contexts as joint syntactic dependencies. We test our representation in a verb similarity task on two datasets, showing that joint contexts achieve performances comparable to single dependencies or even better. Moreover, they are able to overcome the data sparsity problem of joint feature spaces, in spite of the limited size of our training corpus.