What are the Goals of Distributional Semantics?

• DOI: 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.663
• Publication Date: 2020-07-29T14:14:43Z
• Authors: Guy Emerson
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Computation and Language; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Computation and Language (cs.CL)

To be published in Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)<br/>Distributional semantic models have become a mainstay in NLP, providing useful features for downstream tasks. However, assessing long-term progress requires explicit long-term goals. In this paper, I take a broad linguistic perspective, looking at how well current models can deal with various semantic challenges. Given stark differences between models proposed in different subfields, a broad perspective is needed to see how we could integrate them. I conclude that, while linguistic insights can guide the design of model architectures, future progress will require balancing the often conflicting demands of linguistic expressiveness and computational tractability.<br/>