This is the repo accompanying the paper "Mr Darcy and Mr Toad, gentlemen: distributional names and their kinds" (Herbelot, 2015). If you use this code for a scientific publication, please cite:

Herbelot, A. 2015. Mr Darcy and Mr Toad, gentlemen: distributional names and their kinds. International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS2015). London, UK.

Abstract

This paper investigates the representation of proper names in distributional semantics. We define three properties we expect names to display: uniqueness (being a unique entity), instantiation (being an instance of a relevant kind) and individuality (being separable from the subspace of concepts). We show that taking a standard distribution as the representation of a name does not satisfy those properties particularly well. We propose an alternative method to compute a name vector, which relies on re-weighting the distribution of the appropriate named entity type – in effect, producing an individual out of a kind. We illustrate the behaviour of such representations over some characters from two English novels.

Clone the repository and unpack the background space:

bzip2 -d BNC.w10.4000c.5000r.ppmi.rownorm.dm.bz2

You can run the baseline on a particular book and character in the following way:

python3 baseline.py Darcy_N data/pride/pride.dm data/pride/pride.cols

You can perform the contextualisation of one of the character names in the data by running e.g.:

python3 contextualise.py man_N data/pride/Darcy.chars 20 6

The characteristic contexts for each character are in the data/ directory.