Comparative Probing of Lexical Semantics Theories for Cognitive Plausibility and Technological Usefulness

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is\nrepresented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus\nraising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior\nto the others in representing lexical semantics appropriately? Or in its non\nantagonistic counterpart: could there be a unified account of lexical semantics\nwhere these approaches seamlessly emerge as (partial) renderings of (different)\naspects of a core semantic knowledge base?\n In this paper, we contribute to these research questions with a number of\nexperiments that systematically probe different lexical semantics theories for\ntheir levels of cognitive plausibility and of technological usefulness.\n The empirical findings obtained from these experiments advance our insight on\nlexical semantics as the feature-based approach emerges as superior to the\nother ones, and arguably also move us closer to finding answers to the research\nquestions above.\n