A Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions
  with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces
Gabriella Chronis Kyle Mahowald Katrin Erk
We study semantic construal in grammatical constructions using large language
models. First, we project contextual word embeddings into three interpretable
semantic spaces, each defined by a different set of psycholinguistic feature
norms. We validate these interpretable spaces and then use them to
automatically derive semantic characterizations of lexical items in two
grammatical constructions: nouns in subject or object position within the same
sentence, and the AANN construction (e.g., `a beautiful three days'). We show
that a word in subject position is interpreted as more agentive than the very
same word in object position, and that the nouns in the AANN construction are
interpreted as more measurement-like than when in the canonical alternation.
Our method can probe the distributional meaning of syntactic constructions at a
templatic level, abstracted away from specific lexemes.