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Lecture #1

Word Meaning

  • Denotational Semantics
  • Distributional Semantics
  • Localist Representation (like one-hot vectors)
  • Distributed Representation (like word-vectors)
NLTK example: synonyms of word good 
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❯ python 01_word_meaning.py
noun: good
noun: goodgoodness
noun: goodgoodness
noun: commoditytrade_goodgood
adj: good
adj (s): fullgood
adj: good
adj (s): estimablegoodhonorablerespectable
adj (s): beneficialgood
adj (s): good
adj (s): goodjustupright
adj (s): adeptexpertgoodpracticedproficientskillfulskilful
adj (s): good
adj (s): deargoodnear
adj (s): dependablegoodsafesecure
adj (s): goodrightripe
adj (s): goodwell
adj (s): effectivegoodin_effectin_force
adj (s): good
adj (s): goodserious
adj (s): goodsound
adj (s): goodsalutary
adj (s): goodhonest
adj (s): goodundecomposedunspoiledunspoilt
adj (s): good
adv: wellgood
adv: thoroughlysoundlygood
Problems with toolkits like WordNet
  • Great as a resource but missing nuance
    • Example: proficent is listed as a synonym for good; but it is correct only in some contexts.
  • Missing new meaning of words
    • Example: new slang words etc like wicked, badass, nifty etc.
    • IMPOSSIBLE to keep up-to-date
  • Very Subjective
  • Requires human labour to curate and maintain
  • Can't compute accurate word-similarity.

References

  1. Stanford's NLP+DL course. ↩