# Derivational Morphological Relations in Word Embeddings

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how word embeddings can reveal derivational relationships in Czech, using clustering of embedding differences to match semantic categories of word derivations.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that unsupervised clustering of embedding differences effectively captures derivational relations and semantic categories in morphologically rich Czech.

## Key findings

- Clusters largely match manually annotated semantic categories
- Embedding differences can identify derivational relations
- Method works well in morphologically rich language

## Abstract

Derivation is a type of a word-formation process which creates new words from existing ones by adding, changing or deleting affixes. In this paper, we explore the potential of word embeddings to identify properties of word derivations in the morphologically rich Czech language. We extract derivational relations between pairs of words from DeriNet, a Czech lexical network, which organizes almost one million Czech lemmata into derivational trees. For each such pair, we compute the difference of the embeddings of the two words, and perform unsupervised clustering of the resulting vectors. Our results show that these clusters largely match manually annotated semantic categories of the derivational relations (e.g. the relation 'bake--baker' belongs to category 'actor', and a correct clustering puts it into the same cluster as 'govern--governor').