The Frobenius anatomy of word meanings II: possessive relative pronouns
This work addresses a specific linguistic problem in computational semantics, building incrementally on prior methods for relative pronouns.
The paper tackles the semantic interpretation of possessive relative pronouns within a categorical compositional distributional model, using Frobenius algebras to show how word meanings interact in relative clauses, and provides preliminary experimental evidence.
Within the categorical compositional distributional model of meaning, we provide semantic interpretations for the subject and object roles of the possessive relative pronoun `whose'. This is done in terms of Frobenius algebras over compact closed categories. These algebras and their diagrammatic language expose how meanings of words in relative clauses interact with each other. We show how our interpretation is related to Montague-style semantics and provide a truth-theoretic interpretation. We also show how vector spaces provide a concrete interpretation and provide preliminary corpus-based experimental evidence. In a prequel to this paper, we used similar methods and dealt with the case of subject and object relative pronouns.