{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-method-for-studying-semantic-construal-in","title":"A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces","arxiv_id":"2305.18598","date":"2023-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gabriella Chronis","Kyle Mahowald","Katrin Erk"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18598v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.18598v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-method-for-studying-semantic-construal-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/gchronis/features_in_context","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"object","task_name":"Object"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.18598","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}