A Compositional Explanation of the ‘Pet Fish’ Phenomenon
Table 4: Cosine similarity for relative pronoun model
['[EMPTY]', 'goldfish', 'cat', 'shark']
Using this representation of the verb ‘to be’ and the grammatical structure of relative pronouns, we have the following: −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→pet which is a fish=−→pet⊙(is––×−−−→fish)=[0.29,0.18,0.06,0.22,0.22,0.35]⊤ and −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→fish which is a pet=−−−→fish⊙(is––×−→pet)=[0.23,0.24,0,0.27,0.27,0.32]⊤ We see that the similarity of ‘goldfish’ to ‘pet which is a fish’ and ‘fish which is a pet’ is higher than its similarity to either ‘pet’ or ‘fish’. In addition, similarity of each animal to ‘pet which is a fish’ is not identical to its similarity to ‘fish which is a pet’.