Author:

Keywords:

visualization, distributional semantics, semantic vector spaces, token-level, multidimensional scaling, lexical semantics, lexicography, dutch

Abstract:

Within Computational Linguistics, distributional models of semantics have become the mainstay of large-scale modelling of lexical semantics. Distributional modelling also holds a large potential for research in Linguistics proper : It allows linguists to base their analysis on large amounts of usage data, thus vastly extending their empirical basis, and makes it possible to detect potentially interesting semantic patterns. However, so far, there have been relatively few applications, mainly because of the technical complexity and the lack of a linguist-friendly interface to explore the output. In this paper, we propose an interactive visualization of a distributional similarity matrix based on Multi-Dimensional Scaling. We present our prototype for a visualization tool built in Processing which opens up new possibilities for the visual analysis of token-based models and apply it to a small case study of a Dutch polysemous word.