Corpus-based Learning of Analogies and Semantic Relations
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present an algorithm for learning from unlabeled text, based on the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval, that can solve verbal analogy questions of the kind found in the SAT college entrance exam. A verbal analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning "A is to B as C is to D"; for example, mason:stone::carpenter:wood. SAT analogy questions provide a word pair, A:B, and the problem is to select the most analogous word pair, C:D, from a set of five choices. The VSM algorithm correctly answers 47% of a collection of 374 college-level analogy questions (random guessing would yield 20% correct; the average college-bound senior high school student answers about 57% correctly). We motivate this research by applying it to a difficult problem in natural language processing, determining semantic relations in noun-modifier pairs. The problem is to classify a noun-modifier pair, such as "laser printer", according to the semantic relation between the noun (printer) and the modifier (laser). We use a supervised nearest-neighbour algorithm that assigns a class to a given noun-modifier pair by finding the most analogous noun-modifier pair in the training data. With 30 classes of semantic relations, on a collection of 600 labeled noun-modifier pairs, the learning algorithm attains an F value of 26.5% (random guessing: 3.3%). With 5 classes of semantic relations, the F value is 43.2% (random: 20%). The performance is state-of-the-art for both verbal analogies and noun-modifier relations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it