The compositionality degree of multiword expressions indicates to what extent the meaning of a phrase can be derived from the meaning of its constituents and their grammatical relations. Prediction of (non)-compositionality is a task that has been frequently addressed with distributional semantic models. We introduce a novel technique to blend hierarchical information with distributional information for predicting compositionality. In particular, we use hypernymy information of the multiword and its constituents encoded in the form of the recently introduced Poincare embeddings in addition to the distributional information to detect compositionality for noun phrases. Using a weighted average of the distributional similarity and a Poincare similarity function, we obtain consistent and substantial, statistically significant improvement across three gold standard datasets over state-of-the-art models based on distributional information only. Unlike traditional approaches that solely use an unsupervised setting, we have also framed the problem as a supervised task, obtaining comparable improvements. Further, we publicly release our Poincare embeddings, which are trained on the output of handcrafted lexical-syntactic patterns on a large corpus.
Some of the initial efforts on compositionality prediction were undertaken by , who use LSA to calculate the similarity between a phrase and its components, whereas extend this idea with collocation features (e.g., phrase frequency, point-wise mutual information). Researchers also tried to identify non-compositionality in verb-noun phrases using syntax @cite_13 and selectional preferences @cite_26 . Attempts to examine the possibility to derive the semantics of a compound or multiword expression from its parts have been researched extensively . define a compositionality score and use different vector operations to estimate the semantic distance between a phrase and its individual components. Some of the investigations are made for compositionality detection using representation learning of word embeddings . also show that distributional similarity over multiple languages can help in improving the quality of compositionality prediction.
@cite_26 @cite_13
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We present a novel unsupervised approach to detecting the compositionality of multi-word expressions. We compute the compositionality of a phrase through substituting the constituent words with their “neighbours” in a semantic vector space and averaging over the distance between the original phrase and the substituted neighbour phrases. Several methods of obtaining neighbours are presented. The results are compared to existing supervised results and achieve state-of-the-art performance on a verb-object dataset of human compositionality ratings. A multiword is compositional if its meaning can be expressed in terms of the meaning of its constituents. In this paper, we collect and analyse the compositionality judgments for a range of compound nouns using Mechanical Turk. Unlike existing compositionality datasets, our dataset has judgments on the contribution of constituent words as well as judgments for the phrase as a whole. We use this dataset to study the relation between the judgments at constituent level to that for the whole phrase. We then evaluate two different types of distributional models for compositionality detection – constituent based models and composition function based models. Both the models show competitive performance though the composition function based models perform slightly better. In both types, additive models perform better than their multiplicative counterparts. Non-compositionality of multiword expressions is an intriguing problem that can be the source of error in a variety of NLP tasks such as language generation, machine translation and word sense disambiguation. We present methods of non-compositionality detection for English noun compounds using the unsupervised learning of a semantic composition function. Compounds which are not well modeled by the learned semantic composition function are considered noncompositional. We explore a range of distributional vector-space models for semantic composition, empirically evaluate these models, and propose additional methods which improve results further. We show that a complex function such as polynomial projection can learn semantic composition and identify non-compositionality in an unsupervised way, beating all other baselines ranging from simple to complex. We show that enforcing sparsity is a useful regularizer in learning complex composition functions. We show further improvements by training a decomposition function in addition to the composition function. Finally, we propose an EM algorithm over latent compositionality annotations that also improves the performance. This paper presents the first attempt to use word embeddings to predict the compositionality of multiword expressions. We consider both single- and multi-prototype word embeddings. Experimental results show that, in combination with a back-off method based on string similarity, word embeddings outperform a method using count-based distributional similarity. Our best results are competitive with, or superior to, state-of-the-art methods over three standard compositionality datasets, which include two types of multiword expressions and two languages.