A Frobenius Model of Information Structure in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics

TL;DR

This paper extends the categorical compositional distributional semantics model to incorporate intonational information using Frobenius algebraic structures, enabling richer meaning representations of spoken language.

Contribution

It introduces a Frobenius algebra-based extension to the model, allowing it to handle intonational cues in semantic composition.

Findings

The extended model captures additional meaning conveyed by intonation.

Theoretical framework and semantics for intonationally-marked utterances are developed.

Extensive examples demonstrate the model's applicability.

Abstract

The categorical compositional distributional model of Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark provides a linguistically motivated procedure for computing the meaning of a sentence as a function of the distributional meaning of the words therein. The theoretical framework allows for reasoning about compositional aspects of language and offers structural ways of studying the underlying relationships. While the model so far has been applied on the level of syntactic structures, a sentence can bring extra information conveyed in utterances via intonational means. In the current paper we extend the framework in order to accommodate this additional information, using Frobenius algebraic structures canonically induced over the basis of finite-dimensional vector spaces. We detail the theory, provide truth-theoretic and distributional semantics for meanings of intonationally-marked utterances, and present justifications and extensive examples.