Words, Categories, and Entities

Sebastian Padó

University Of Stuttgart, Institute for Natural Language Processing

The distinction between categories (“country”) and entities (“Italy”, “UK”) is a fundamental one in formal semantics but has found little attention in distributional semantics. I propose that entities provide interesting insights into the capabilities and limits of distributional semantics.

Concretely, I will speak about a series of studies concerned with (a), predicting entity properties; and (b), modeling categories in terms of their constituent entities.