Looking at word meaning. An interactive visualization of Semantic Vector Spaces for Dutch synsets

摘要

In statistical NLP, Semantic Vector Spaces (SVS) are the standard technique for the automatic modeling of lexical semantics. However, it is largely unclear how these black-box techniques exactly capture word meaning. To explore the way an SVS structures the individual occurrences of words, we use a non-parametric MDS solution of a token-by-token similarity matrix. The MDS solution is visualized in an interactive plot with the Google Chart Tools. As a case study, we look at the occurrences of 476 Dutch nouns grouped in 214 synsets.