Speaker
Affilliation
Sheffield
Abstract
The talk addresses the English Lexical Substitution Task: given a target word and the sentence in which it appears, the task is to find candidate word(s) which could be used in place of the target word without altering the sentence's meaning. I will present a method for performing this task, which incorporates primitive notions both of whether the candidate word matches the target word's semantics, and also whether the candidate word is grammatically coherent in the target word's place. Whilst approaches to this task thus far have largely concentrated on one or another of these concerns, the method we present shows that using a full probability model defined over random variables designed to represent both aspects of the sentence is both achievable and demonstrates significant improvement over either of the aspects alone. I suggest that, coupled with an optimal strategy for determining the set of candidate words, the technique would achieve state-of-the-art performance.