Intensionality was only alleged: on adjective-noun composition in distributional semantics

Abstract

Distributional semantics has very successfully modeled semantic phenomena at the word level, and recently interest has grown in extending it to capture the meaning of phrases via semantic composition. We present experiments in adjective-noun composition which (1) show that adjectival modification can be successfully modeled with distributional semantics, (2) show that composition models inspired by the semantics of higher-order predication fare better than those that perform simple feature union or intersection, (3) contrary to what the theoretical literature might lead one to expect, do not yield a distinction between intensional and non-intensional modification, and (4) suggest that head noun polysemy and whether the adjective corresponds to a typical attribute of the noun are relevant factors in the distributional representation of adjective phrases.