The Semantic Vectors Package: New Algorithms and Public Tools for Distributional Semantics
Venue
Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC2010), IEEE
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Dominic Widdows, Trevor Cohen
BibTeX
Abstract
Distributional semantics is the branch of natural language processing that attempts
to model the meanings of words, phrases and documents from the distribution and
usage of words in a corpus of text. In the past three years, research in this area
has been accelerated by the availability of the Semantic Vectors package, a stable,
fast, scalable, and free software package for creating and exploring concepts in
distributional models. This paper introduces the broad field of distributional
semantics, the role of vector models within this field, and describes some of the
results that have been made possible by the Semantic Vectors package. These
applications of Semantic Vectors have so far included contributions to medical
informatics and knowledge discovery, analysis of scientific articles, and even
Biblical scholarship. Of particular interest is the recent emergence of models that
take word order and other ordered structures into account, using permutation of
coordinates to model directional relationships and semantic predicates.
