In recent years, distributional models (DMs) have shown great success in representing lexical semantics. In this work we show that the extent to which DMs represent semantic knowledge is highly dependent on the type of knowledge. We pose the task of predicting properties of concrete nouns in a supervised setting, and compare between learning taxonomic properties (e.g., animacy) and attributive properties (e.g., size, color). We employ four state-of-the-art DMs as sources of feature representation for this task, and show that they all yield poor results when tested on attributive properties, achieving no more than an average F-score of 0.37 in the binary property prediction task, compared to 0.73 on taxonomic properties. Our results suggest that the distributional hypothesis may not be equally applicable to all types of semantic information.

No abstract

Among the hidden treasures squirreled away in the archives of Israel’s National Library lies a fragmented correspondence that sheds new light on the afterlife of a project that was long deemed the farewell gift to the German language and culture from the remnants of its Jewry. It is an exchange of letters between two scholars, whose interest in the German rendition of the Bible occupied them for many years, first in Germany, and later in the land where Hebrew was vernacular and where one might think there would no longer be a need for translations of the Bible; particularly not into a language that aroused considerable aversion in the aftermath of the war. And yet, the 1963–64 exchange between the two Jerusalemites, the Vienna-born and Frankfurt-crowned philosopher, theologian, and translator Martin Buber and the Riga-born, Berlin- and Marburg-educated biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz tells a different story. It shows they both believed the project that began under the title Die Schrift, zu verdeutschen unternommen should be revised once again, after its completion so as to underline its ongoing relevance for present and future readings of the Bible tout court, in German and Hebrew speaking lands alike.