🧑‍🔬 David Weir

David Weir works on the formal and statistical study of language. The earliest paper here asks what grammar formalisms say about structure, not only about the strings they generate. The later papers turn to lexical semantics: how distributional evidence, meaning the contexts in which words occur in large parsed corpora, can show which words are similar in meaning and how they relate. Across both strands, the work tends to build general frameworks in which competing proposals can be compared on shared terms. It draws on syntax and grammar formalisms and on ideas borrowed from information retrieval.

The most cited paper here is Characterizing Structural Descriptions Produced by Various Grammatical Formalisms from 1987. It compares formalisms such as context-free grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, Head Grammars and Indexed Grammars by looking at the trees they assign and at their derivation histories. On that basis it groups several different-looking systems together. Two later papers with Julie Weeds develop co-occurrence retrieval. A General Framework for Distributional Similarity (2003) and Co-occurrence Retrieval (2005) treat word similarity as a retrieval task. They score how much of one word's contextual features another word covers using precision and recall, and they show that several existing measures fall out as special cases of one tunable family.

The newest paper here, Learning to Distinguish Hypernyms and Co-Hyponyms (2014), takes up a question the earlier frameworks pointed towards: telling apart asymmetric relations, where one word is more general than the other, from symmetric ones between sibling terms. It trains classifiers on combined word vectors built from parsed Wikipedia text. It also proposes evaluation safeguards that keep test words out of training, so that a model cannot simply memorise which words tend to be general.

Weir's papers here are connected with the University of Sussex, where the distributional work with Julie Weeds and Daoud Clarke belongs. The earlier grammar-formalism research was written with K. Vijay-Shanker and Aravind Joshi and is linked to the University of Pennsylvania.

David Weir has 4 papers in our library, in 1987–2014, most of them on Lexical semantics & word embeddings, Information retrieval & search, Syntax & grammar formalisms; often with Julie Weeds, Aravind Joshi, Daoud Clarke.