Learning Word Embeddings for Hyponymy with Entailment-Based Distributional Semantics

Abstract: Lexical entailment, such as hyponymy, is a fundamental issue in the semantics of natural language. This paper proposes distributional semantic models which efficiently learn word embeddings for entailment, using a recently-proposed framework for modelling entailment in a vector-space. These models postulate a latent vector for a pseudo-phrase containing two neighbouring word vectors. We investigate both modelling words as the evidence they contribute about this phrase vector, or as the posterior distribution of a one-word phrase vector, and find that the posterior vectors perform better. The resulting word embeddings outperform the best previous results on predicting hyponymy between words, in unsupervised and semi-supervised experiments.