Evaluating Distributed Representations for Multi-Level Lexical Semantics: A Research Proposal

Abstract: Modern neural networks (NNs), trained on extensive raw sentence data, construct distributed representations by compressing individual words into dense, continuous, high-dimensional vectors. These representations are expected to capture multi-level lexical meaning. In this thesis, our objective is to examine the efficacy of distributed representations from NNs in encoding lexical meaning. Initially, we identify and formalize three levels of lexical semantics: \textit{local}, \textit{global}, and \textit{mixed} levels. Then, for each level, we evaluate LLMs by collecting or constructing multilingual datasets, leveraging various LLMs, and employing linguistic analysis theories. This thesis builds a bridge between computational models and lexical semantics, aiming to complement each other.