Increasing Sentence-Level Comprehension Through Text Classification of Epistemic Functions

Maria Berger, Elizabeth Goldstein

Abstract: Word embeddings capture semantic meaning of individual words. How to bridge word-level linguistic knowledge with sentence-level language representation is an open problem. This paper examines whether sentence-level representations can be achieved by building a custom sentence database focusing on one aspect of a sentence’s meaning. Our three separate semantic aspects are whether the sentence: (1) communicates a causal relationship, (2) indicates that two things are correlated with each other, and (3) expresses information or knowledge. The three classifiers provide epistemic information about a sentence’s content.