Dependency-based construction of semantic space models

Traditionally, vector-based semantic space models use word co-occurrence counts from large corpora to represent lexical meaning. In this article we present a novel framework for constructing semantic spaces that takes syntactic relations into account. We introduce aformalizationfor this class of models, which allows linguistic knowledge to guide the construction process. We evaluate our framework on a range of tasks relevant for cognitive science and natural language processing: semantic priming, synonymy detection, and word sense disambiguation. In all cases, our framework obtains results that are comparable or superior to the state of the art.