Probabilistic Modeling of Joint-context in Distributional Similarity

Oren Melamud, Ido Dagan, Jacob Goldberger, Idan Szpektor, and Deniz Yuret. In the Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2014). (Download W14-1619)

Abstract: Most traditional distributional similarity models fail to capture syntagmatic patterns that group together multiple word features within the same joint context. In this work we introduce a novel generic distributional similarity scheme under which the power of probabilistic models can be leveraged to effectively model joint contexts. Based on this scheme, we implement a concrete model which utilizes probabilistic n-gram language models. Our evaluations suggest that this model is particularly well-suited for measuring similarity for verbs, which are known to exhibit richer syntagmatic patterns, while maintaining comparable or better performance with respect to competitive baselines for nouns. Following this, we propose our scheme as a framework for future semantic similarity models leveraging the substantial body of work that exists in probabilistic language modeling.