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Probing the Representational Structure of Regular Polysemy via Sense Analogy Questions: Insights from Contextual Word Vectors.

Authors :
Li J
Armstrong BC
Source :
Cognitive science [Cogn Sci] 2024 Mar; Vol. 48 (3), pp. e13416.
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support answering sense analogy questions similar to "is the mapping between CHICKEN (as an animal) and CHICKEN (as a meat) similar to that which maps between LOBSTER (as an animal) to LOBSTER (as a meat)?" We did so using the LRcos model, which combines a logistic regression classifier of different categories (e.g., animal vs. meat) with a measure of cosine similarity. We found that (a) the model was sensitive to the shared structure within a given regular relationship; (b) the shared structure varies across different regular relationships (e.g., animal/meat vs. location/organization), potentially reflective of a "regularity continuum;" (c) some high-order latent structure is shared across different regular relationships, suggestive of a similar latent structure across different types of relationships; and (d) there is a lack of evidence for the aforementioned effects being explained by meaning overlap. Lastly, we found that both components of the LRcos model made important contributions to accurate responding and that a variation of this method could yield an accuracy boost of 10% in answering sense analogy questions. These findings enrich previous theoretical work on regular polysemy with a computationally explicit theory and methods, and provide evidence for an important organizational principle for the mental lexicon and the broader conceptual knowledge system.<br /> (© 2024 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1551-6709
Volume :
48
Issue :
3
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Cognitive science
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
38482721
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13416