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Distributional Semantics

Alessandro Lenci author Magnus Sahlgren author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:21st Sep '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Distributional Semantics cover

This book provides a comprehensive foundation for the use of distributional methods in computational modeling of meaning.

This book provides a comprehensive foundation of distributional methods in computational modeling of meaning. It aims to build a common understanding of the theoretical and methodological foundations for students of computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.Distributional semantics develops theories and methods to represent the meaning of natural language expressions, with vectors encoding their statistical distribution in linguistic contexts. It is at once a theoretical model to express meaning, a practical methodology to construct semantic representations, a computational framework for acquiring meaning from language data, and a cognitive hypothesis about the role of language usage in shaping meaning. This book aims to build a common understanding of the theoretical and methodological foundations of distributional semantics. Beginning with its historical origins, the text exemplifies how the distributional approach is implemented in distributional semantic models. The main types of computational models, including modern deep learning ones, are described and evaluated, demonstrating how various types of semantic issues are addressed by those models. Open problems and challenges are also analyzed. Students and researchers in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science will appreciate this book.

'Lenci and Sahlgren's textbook is a landmark contribution to the fast growing and increasingly important discipline of distributional semantics. They have managed to distill 60 years of diverse research on distributional semantics, from its beginning in structural and corpus linguistics and psychology, through the application of techniques from information retrieval and linear algebra, to the most recent developments driven by deep neural networks and large language models in NLP. The authors synthesize the major findings from different fields and integrate these diverse traditions into a comprehensive and coherent framework of distributional meaning. Lenci and Sahlgren's text promises to be the new standard for reference and teaching in this area.' James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University

ISBN: 9781107004290

Dimensions: 235mm x 158mm x 30mm

Weight: 790g

452 pages