What is a word representation or meaning?
What is meant by the word meaning? This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one. So, we will not try to discern the best answer for this question, but accept a more modest answer, that is, meaning is the idea conveyed by or some representation associated with a word. For example, when you hear the word “cat” you conjure up a mental picture of something that meows, has four legs, has a tail, and so on; then, if you hear the word “dog,” you again formulate a mental image of something that barks, has a bigger body than a cat, has four legs, has a tail, and so on. In this new space (that is, the mental pictures), it is easier for you to understand that cats and dogs are similar than by just looking at the words. Since the primary objective of NLP is to achieve human-like performance in linguistic tasks, it is sensible to explore principled ways of representing words for machines. To achieve this, we...
