Compositional Operators in Distributional Semantics
It addresses the integration of two key semantic paradigms for computational linguistics researchers, but is incremental as it surveys existing work.
This survey reviews recent advances in unifying compositional formal semantics and distributional vector space models in computational linguistics, focusing on models that provide compositionality in distributional semantics and detailing a category theory-based framework as an example.
This survey presents in some detail the main advances that have been recently taking place in Computational Linguistics towards the unification of the two prominent semantic paradigms: the compositional formal semantics view and the distributional models of meaning based on vector spaces. After an introduction to these two approaches, I review the most important models that aim to provide compositionality in distributional semantics. Then I proceed and present in more detail a particular framework by Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark (2010) based on the abstract mathematical setting of category theory, as a more complete example capable to demonstrate the diversity of techniques and scientific disciplines that this kind of research can draw from. This paper concludes with a discussion about important open issues that need to be addressed by the researchers in the future.