Using Sentence Plausibility to Learn the Semantics of Transitive Verbs

Abstract: The functional approach to compositional distributional semantics considers transitive verbs to be linear maps that transform the distributional vectors representing nouns into a vector representing a sentence. We conduct an initial investigation that uses a matrix consisting of the parameters of a logistic regression classifier trained on a plausibility task as a transitive verb function. We compare our method to a commonly used corpus-based method for constructing a verb matrix and find that the plausibility training may be more effective for disambiguation tasks.