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arXiv · 2305.18598

A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces

Gabriella Chronis·Kyle Mahowald·Katrin Erk
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Abstract

We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms. We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., `a beautiful three days'). We show that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation. Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.

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Gabriella Chronis, Kyle Mahowald, Katrin Erk. 2023-05-29. A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18598

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