Integrating lexical-conceptual and distributional semantics: a case report.

Abstract

Bymeansofacase study on German verbs prefixed with the preposition ¨ uber (‘over’) we compare alternation-based lexical-conceptual and usage-based distributional approaches to verb meaning. Our investigation supports the view that when distributional vectors are rendered human-interpretable by approximation of their representation with its nearest neighbour words in the semantic vector space, they reflect conceptual commonalities between verbs similar to those targeted in lexical-conceptual semantics. Moreover, our case study shows that distributional representations reveal conceptual features of verb meaning that are difficult if not impossible to detect and represent in theoretical frameworks of lexical semantics and thus that a general theory of word meaning requires a combination and complementation of lexical and distributional methods.