Towards a Distributional Model of Semantic Complexity

Emmanuele Chersoni, Philippe Blache, Alessandro Lenci


Abstract
In this paper, we introduce for the first time a Distributional Model for computing semantic complexity, inspired by the general principles of the Memory, Unification and Control framework(Hagoort, 2013; Hagoort, 2016). We argue that sentence comprehension is an incremental process driven by the goal of constructing a coherent representation of the event represented by the sentence. The composition cost of a sentence depends on the semantic coherence of the event being constructed and on the activation degree of the linguistic constructions. We also report the results of a first evaluation of the model on the Bicknell dataset (Bicknell et al., 2010).
Anthology ID:
W16-4102
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta, Giulia Venturi, Thomas François, Philippe Blache
Venue:
CL4LC
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
12–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4102
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emmanuele Chersoni, Philippe Blache, and Alessandro Lenci. 2016. Towards a Distributional Model of Semantic Complexity. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), pages 12–22, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Distributional Model of Semantic Complexity (Chersoni et al., CL4LC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4102.pdf