Orthogonality of Syntax and Semantics within Distributional Spaces

Jeff Mitchell and Mark Steedman


Abstract

A recent distributional approach to word-analogy problems \cite{mikolovetal2013} exploits interesting regularities in the structure of the space of representations. Investigating further, we find that performance on this task can be related to orthogonality within the space. Explicitly designing such structure into a neural network model results in representations that decompose into orthogonal semantic and syntactic subspaces. We demonstrate that learning from word-order and morphological structure within English Wikipedia text to enable this decomposition can produce substantial improvements on semantic-similarity, pos-induction and word-analogy tasks.