Distributional semantic methods have some a priori appeal as models of human meaning acquisition, because they induce word representations from contextual distributions naturally occurring in corpus data without need for supervision. However, learning the meaning of a (concrete) word also involves establishing a link between the word and its typical visual referents, which is beyond the scope of classic, text-based distributional semantics. Since recently several proposals have been put forward about how to induce multimodal word representations from linguistic and visual contexts, it is natural to ask if this line of work, besides its practical implications, can help us to develop more realistic, grounded models of human word learning within the distributional semantics framework.
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