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arXiv · 2309.08325

Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis and Quantifications: Probing for Hypernymy in Functional Distributional Semantics

Chun Hei Lo·Wai Lam·Hong Cheng·Guy Emerson
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Abstract

Functional Distributional Semantics (FDS) models the meaning of words by truth-conditional functions. This provides a natural representation for hypernymy but no guarantee that it can be learnt when FDS models are trained on a corpus. In this paper, we probe into FDS models and study the representations learnt, drawing connections between quantifications, the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis (DIH), and the variational-autoencoding objective of FDS model training. Using synthetic data sets, we reveal that FDS models learn hypernymy on a restricted class of corpus that strictly follows the DIH. We further introduce a training objective that both enables hypernymy learning under the reverse of the DIH and improves hypernymy detection from real corpora.

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Chun Hei Lo, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng, Guy Emerson. 2023-09-15. Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis and Quantifications: Probing for Hypernymy in Functional Distributional Semantics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08325

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