Modelling the Meaning of Argument Constructions with Distributional Semantics

Current computational models of argument constructions typically represent their semantic content with hand-made formal structures. Here we present a distributional model implementing the idea that the meaning of a construction is in- timately related to the semantics of its typical verbs. First, we identify the typical verbs occurring with a given syntactic construction and build their distributional vectors. We then calculate the weighted centroid of these vectors in order to derive the distributional signature of a construction. In or- der to assess the goodness of our approach, we replicated the priming effect described by Johnson and Golberg (2013) as a function of the semantic distance between a construction and its prototypical verbs. Additional support for our view comes from a regression analysis showing that our distributional in- formation can be used to model behavioral data collected with a crowdsourced elicitation experiment.