Approaching meaning differently: word embeddings as a tool for linguistic analysis

"How do we define meaning in language? While traditional linguistics has relied on semantic concepts or lexical relations, distributional approaches, captured in Firth’s observation that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”, view meaning as emerging from patterns of usage. Recent advances in computational linguistics have enabled these patterns to be modelled through word embeddings.
This talk shows how embeddings can be used as a tool for traditional linguistic research, with examples from studies on semantic similarity, mutual intelligibility, and language processing."