Exploring Word Composition Knowledge in Language Usages

Yuchen Han, Tianyuan Liu, YUQING SUN, Tian Huang, Huiqian Wu, Shengjun Wu

Abstract:

The creativity of language is a distinct feature that sets
humans apart from machines and animals, where the flexibility of word
composition is the fundamental part. The patterns on words that are sys-
tematically linked together are acknowledged as the word composition
knowledge. We explore this knowledge by combining the syntax infor-
mation with word semantics and verify it through a series of empirical
experiments on multiple datasets. From the linguistic perspective, we
found that this knowledge can find the appropriate alternatives for the
given phrase and generate high-quality paraphrases that satisfy both the
syntax soundness and the semantic consistency with the original text.
We also verify it on the questionnaires in psychological testing and find
the abnormal patterns on the language usages. Compared to the large
pre-trained models, this method is much more training-economic and can
generate the paraphrases in an explainable way