Papers › Specialising Word Vectors for Lexical Entailment

Specialising Word Vectors for Lexical Entailment

1 Jun 2018NAACL 2018 6archive 2025-07-28

Ivan Vuli{\'c}, Nikola Mrk{\v{s}}i{\'c}

We present LEAR (Lexical Entailment Attract-Repel), a novel post-processing method that transforms any input word vector space to emphasise the asymmetric relation of lexical entailment (LE), also known as the IS-A or hyponymy-hypernymy relation. By injecting external linguistic constraints (e.g., WordNet links) into the initial vector space, the LE specialisation procedure brings true hyponymy-hypernymy pairs closer together in the transformed Euclidean space. The proposed asymmetric distance measure adjusts the norms of word vectors to reflect the actual WordNet-style hierarchy of concepts. Simultaneously, a joint objective enforces semantic similarity using the symmetric cosine distance, yielding a vector space specialised for both lexical relations at once. LEAR specialisation achieves state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of hypernymy directionality, hypernymy detection, and graded lexical entailment, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed asymmetric specialisation model.

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Dialogue State TrackingLexical EntailmentMachine TranslationNatural Language InferenceRepresentation LearningSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual SimilarityText GenerationWord Embeddings

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