@inproceedings{chronis-etal-2023-method,
    title = "A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces",
    author = "Chronis, Gabriella  and
      Mahowald, Kyle  and
      Erk, Katrin",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.14",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.14",
    pages = "242--261",
    abstract = "We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms. We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., {`}a beautiful three days{'}). We show that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation. Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.",
}

We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature norms. We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., {`}a beautiful three days{'}). We show that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation. Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.
Chronis, Gabriella Mahowald, Kyle Erk, Katrin
A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces