Text: now in 2D! A framework for lexical expansion with contextual similarity

A new metaphor of two-dimensional text for data-driven semantic modeling of natural language is proposed, which provides an entirely new angle on the representation of text: not only syntagmatic relations are annotated in the text, but also paradigmatic relations are made explicit by generating lexical expansions. We operationalize dis-tributional similarity in a general framework for large corpora, and describe a new method to generate similar terms in context. Our evaluation shows that distributional similarity is able to produce high-quality lexical resources in an unsupervised and knowledge-free way, and that our highly scalable similarity measure yields better scores in a WordNet-based evaluation than previous measures for very large corpora. Evaluating on a lexical substitution task, we find that our contextualization method improves over a non-contextualized base-line across all parts of speech, and we show how the metaphor can be applied successfully to part-of-speech tagging. A number of ways to extend and improve the contextualization method within our framework are discussed. As opposed to comparable approaches, our framework defines a model of lexical expansions in context that can generate the expansions as opposed to ranking a given list, and thus does not require existing lexical-semantic resources.