Compositional Operations in Semantic Space

Objective

The ability to construct new meanings by combining words into larger constituents is one of the fundamental and peculiarly human characteristics of language. Systems that induce the meaning and combinatorial properties of linguistic symbols from data are highly desirable both from a theoretical perspective (modeling a core aspect of cognition) and for practical purposes (supporting human-computer interaction). COMPOSES tackles the meaning induction and composition problem from a new perspective that brings together corpus-based distributional semantics (that is very successful at inducing the meaning of single content words, but ignores functional elements and compositionality) and formal semantics (that focuses on functional elements and composition, but largely ignores lexical aspects of meaning and lacks methods to learn the proposed structures from data). As in distributional semantics, we represent some content words (such as nouns) by vectors recording their corpus contexts. Implementing instead ideas from formal semantics, functional elements (such as determiners) are represented by functions mapping from expressions of one type onto composite expressions of the same or other types. These composition functions are induced from corpus data by statistical learning of mappings from observed context vectors of input arguments to observed context vectors of composite structures. We model a number of compositional processes in this way, developing a coherent fragment of the semantics of English in a data-driven, large-scale fashion. Given the novelty of the approach, we also propose new evaluation frameworks: On the one hand, we take inspiration from cognitive science and experimental linguistics to design elicitation methods measuring the perceived similarity and plausibility of sentences. On the other, specialized entailment tests will assess the semantic inference properties of our corpus-induced system.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• humanities languages and literature linguistics
• social sciences psychology cognitive psychology

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• ERC-SG-SH4 - ERC Starting Grant - The Human Mind and its complexity

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2011-StG_20101124
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

Beneficiaries (1)