Abstract
A probabilistic version of word distributional equivalence, which includes the usual notion of syntactic distributional classes as a special case, is formulated. A computational procedure for the unsupervised discovery of probabilistic distributional classes, using random text presentation, is shown to converge stochastically to the correct classification. The results of a simulation experiment are presented. A geometrical interpretation of the procedure, in which words are represented as vectors in an infinite-dimensional inner product space, is discussed.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
S. Shrier, “Abduction algorithms for grammar discovery,” Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, R.I. (1977).
S. Marcus,Algebraic Linguistics: Analytical Models (Academic Press, New York, 1967).
U. Grenander,Lectures in Pattern Theory, vol. 1 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978).
M. G. Kendall and A. Stuart,The Advanced Theory of Statistics, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Griffin, London, 1977).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brody, E.J. A procedure for the unsupervised abdunction of linguistic distributional classes in probabilistic languages. International Journal of Computer and Information Sciences 11, 193–210 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00999728
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00999728