Abstract

Distributional models of semantics have proven themselves invaluable both in cog-nitive modelling of semantic phenomena and also in practical applications. For ex-ample, they have been used to model judgments of semantic similarity (McDonald, 2000) and association (Denhire and Lemaire, 2004; Griffiths et al., 2007) and have been shown to achieve human level performance on synonymy tests (Landuaer and Dumais, 1997; Griffiths et al., 2007) such as those included in the Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFL). This ability has been put to practical use in automatic the-saurus extraction (Grefenstette, 1994). However, while there has been a considerable amount of research directed at the most effective ways of constructing representations for individual words, the representation of larger constructions, e.g., phrases and sen-tences, has received relatively little attention. In this thesis we examine this issue of how to compose meanings within distributional models of semantics to form represen-tations of multi-word structures. Natural language data typically consists of such complex structures, rather than