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

import nltk
from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn

for synset in wn.synsets("good"):
    for lemma in synset.lemmas():
        print(synset.pos(), lemma.name())

Problems with toolkits like WordNet

  • Great as a resource but missing nuance
    • Example: proficient 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