The Linguistic Significance of Word Vectors and Issues in the Applied Research
Word vectors,the mathematical expression of human languages extracted from large-scale corpora,are an important scientific achievement in computational linguistics.Applying word vectors to linguistics research,linguists can not only describe linguistic phenomena with morphological features,but also provide a powerful means to better grasp semantics.Word vectors prove to be a theoretical foundation for introducing mathematical methods to study and describe the laws of languages,and has been instrumental in solving the calculation problem of language phenomenon.The methodological value of word vectors is that it opens the door for explaining languages with mathematical methods,which can substantially address the linguistics research dilemma of using languages to explain the laws of languages.Foreign studies based on an English word-vector model show that word vectors can calculate five semantic relations and nine grammatical relations in English.Our research based on a Chinese word-vector model shows that word vectors can not only calculate the semantic relationship of some words,but also analyze the meaning induction,use and distribution of Chinese words.These results show that word vectors have applicational value in solving specific linguistic problems.As the technique of word vector continue to evolve,the opaque representation of word vectors has raised new issues in linguistic research,such as the linguistic meaning contained in a high-dimensional word-vector space as well as its decomposition and interpretation,the application paradigm of word vectors in linguistics research,the size and content of corpora required for training word-vector models,the application of word vectors in cross-linguistic research,and the training of word-vector models in specific period of diachronic research.
word vectorlarge language modelmathematical expression of languagecomputational linguistics
万方数据
维普
