Computational Approaches for Understanding Semantic Constraints on Two-termed Coordination Structures

Julie Kallini, Christiane Fellbaum

Abstract: Coordination is a linguistic phenomenon where two or more terms or phrases, called conjuncts, are conjoined by a coordinating conjunction, such as and, or, or but. Well-formed coordination structures seem to require that the conjuncts are semantically similar or related. In this paper, we utilize English corpus data to examine the semantic constraints on syntactically like coordinations, which link constituents with the same lexical or syntactic categories. We examine the extent to which these semantic constraints depend on the type of conjunction or on the lexical or syntactic category of the conjuncts. We employ two distinct, independent metrics to measure the semantic similarity of conjuncts: WordNet relations and semantic word embeddings. Our results indicate that both measures of similarity have varying distributions depending on the particular conjunction and the conjuncts’ lexical or syntactic categories.