Experimenting with Transitive Verbs in a DisCoCat

Formal and distributional semantic models offer complementary benefits in modeling meaning. The categorical compositional distributional model of meaning of Coecke et al. (2010) (abbreviated to DisCoCat in the title) combines aspects of both to provide a general framework in which meanings of words, obtained distributionally, are composed using methods from the logical setting to form sentence meaning. Concrete consequences of this general abstract setting and applications to empirical data are under active study (Grefenstette et al., 2011; Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh, 2011). In this paper, we extend this study by examining transitive verbs, represented as matrices in a DisCoCat. We discuss three ways of constructing such matrices, and evaluate each method in a disambiguation task developed by Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh (2011).