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The Typology of Physical Qualities
Edited by Ekaterina Rakhilina, Tatiana Reznikova and Daria Ryzhova
[Typological Studies in Language 133] 2022
► pp. 309–328

Chapter 11
Constructing a typological questionnaire with distributional semantic models

| HSE University
| Utrecht University

The paper presents a methodology for automatic construction of lexical typological questionnaires for qualitative semantic domains (e.g. sharp, straight, thick, or smooth). Our algorithm is based on data from a monolingual corpus; it constructs a list of collocations for the corresponding lexemes, computes a vector representation for every collocation, clusters the vector space into semantically homogeneous groups and extracts the three central elements from every cluster. We compare the resulting questionnaires against test data from the semantic domains that are already well studied manually. The algorithm demonstrates high quality results and can be used in the practice of lexical typological research.

Keywords: lexical typology, questionnaire, distributional semantic models, physical qualities
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Typological questionnaires in the frame-based approach
  • 4.The algorithm for automatic questionnaire construction
    • 4.1Collecting a list of collocations
    • 4.2Dividing the contexts into frames
      • 4.2.1Distributional semantic models
      • 4.2.2The clustering algorithm
  • 5.Evaluation
    • 5.1The metric
    • 5.2Qualitative analysis of the obtained clusterings
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.133.11ryz
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