Encoding syntactic dependencies using Random Indexing and Wikipedia as a corpus
Pierpaolo Basile, Annalina Caputo · 2012
Abstract. Distributional approaches are based on a simple hypothesis: the meaning of a word can be inferred from its usage. The application of that idea to the vector space model makes possible the construction of a WordSpace in which words are represented by mathematical points in a geometric space. Similar words are represented close in this space and the definition of “word usage ” depends on the definition of the context used to build the space, which can be the whole document, the sentence in which the word occurs, a fixed window of words, or a specific syntactic context. However, in its original formulation WordSpace can take into account only one definition of context at a time. We propose an approach based on vector permutation and Random Indexing to encode several syntactic contexts in a single WordSpace. We adopt WaCkypedia EN corpus to build our WordSpace that is a 2009 dump of the English Wikipedia (about 800 million tokens) annotated with syntactic information provided by a full dependency parser. The effectiveness