The manifold hypothesis suggests that word vectors live on a submanifold within
their ambient vector space. We argue that we should, more accurately, expect
them to live on a pinched manifold: a singular quotient of a manifold obtained
by identifying some of its points. The identified, singular points correspond to
polysemous words, i.e. words with multiple meanings. Our point of view suggests
that monosemous and polysemous words can be distinguished based on the topology
of their neighbourhoods. We present two kinds of empirical evidence to support
this point of view:

(1) We introduce a topological measure of polysemy based on persistent homology
that correlates well with the actual number of meanings of a word.

(2) We propose a simple, topologically motivated solution to the SemEval-2010
task on Word Sense Induction & Disambiguation that produces competitive results.

Topology of Word Embeddings: Singularities Reflect Polysemy

9th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM)

technical paper

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Alexander Jakubowski

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Topology of Word Embeddings: Singularities Reflect Polysemy

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