Coordination in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics
This work addresses a specific challenge in computational linguistics for modeling coordination in language, but it is incremental as it builds on existing categorical frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of representing semantically vacuous words like coordinators in categorical compositional distributional semantics by proposing a morphism based on Frobenius operators to model coordination between identical syntactic types, showing how this representation extends from atomic to compound types.
An open problem with categorical compositional distributional semantics is the representation of words that are considered semantically vacuous from a distributional perspective, such as determiners, prepositions, relative pronouns or coordinators. This paper deals with the topic of coordination between identical syntactic types, which accounts for the majority of coordination cases in language. By exploiting the compact closed structure of the underlying category and Frobenius operators canonically induced over the fixed basis of finite-dimensional vector spaces, we provide a morphism as representation of a coordinator tensor, and we show how it lifts from atomic types to compound types. Linguistic intuitions are provided, and the importance of the Frobenius operators as an addition to the compact closed setting with regard to language is discussed.