A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces
Gabriella Chronis, Kyle Mahowald, Katrin Erk · 2023
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models.First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms.We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., 'a beautiful three days').We show that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation.Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.