{"paper":{"title":"Why So Down? The Role of Negative (and Positive) Pointwise Mutual Information in Distributional Semantics","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Alexandre Salle, Aline Villavicencio","submitted_at":"2019-08-19T17:26:13Z","abstract_excerpt":"In distributional semantics, the pointwise mutual information ($\\mathit{PMI}$) weighting of the cooccurrence matrix performs far better than raw counts. There is, however, an issue with unobserved pair cooccurrences as $\\mathit{PMI}$ goes to negative infinity. This problem is aggravated by unreliable statistics from finite corpora which lead to a large number of such pairs. A common practice is to clip negative $\\mathit{PMI}$ ($\\mathit{\\texttt{-} PMI}$) at $0$, also known as Positive $\\mathit{PMI}$ ($\\mathit{PPMI}$). In this paper, we investigate alternative ways of dealing with $\\mathit{\\text"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1908.06941","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/1908.06941/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}