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U.S. Department of Energy
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Learning word meanings by instruction

Conference ·
OSTI ID:430693
 [1]
  1. Univ. of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA (United States)

We develop techniques for learning the meanings of unknown words in context. Working within a compositional semantics framework, we write down equations in which a sentence`s meaning is some combination function of the meaning of its words. When one of the words is unknown, we ask for a paraphrase of the sentence. We then compute the meaning of the unknown word by inverting parts of the semantic combination function. This technique can be used to learn word-concept mappings, decomposed meanings, and mappings between syntactic and semantic roles. It works for all parts of speech.

OSTI ID:
430693
Report Number(s):
CONF-960876--
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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