Firearms and Tigers are Dangerous, Kitchen Knives and Zebras are Not: Testing whether Word Embeddings Can Tell

Pia Sommerauer, Antske Fokkens
2018 Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP  
This paper presents an approach for investigating the nature of semantic information captured by word embeddings. We propose a method that extends an existing humanelicited semantic property dataset with gold negative examples using crowd judgments. Our experimental approach tests the ability of supervised classifiers to identify semantic features in word embedding vectors and compares this to a feature-identification method based on full vector cosine similarity. The idea behind this method is
more » ... that properties identified by classifiers, but not through full vector comparison are captured by embeddings. Properties that cannot be identified by either method are not. Our results provide an initial indication that semantic properties relevant for the way entities interact (e.g. dangerous) are captured, while perceptual information (e.g. colors) is not represented. We conclude that, though preliminary, these results show that our method is suitable for identifying which properties are captured by embeddings. 1 The hypotheses and code for our experiments can
doi:10.18653/v1/w18-5430 dblp:conf/emnlp/SommerauerF18 fatcat:4hoy34el4zgldpfa2vmafz2xpe