Representing Verbs with Visual Argument Vectors

Is it possible to use images to model verb semantic similarities? Starting from this core question, we developed two textual distributional semantic models and a visual one. We found it particularly interesting and challenging to investigate this Part of Speech since verbs are not often analysed in researches focused on multimodal distributional semantics. After the creation of the visual and textual distributional space, the three models were evaluated in relation to SimLex-999, a gold standard resource. Through this evaluation, we demonstrate that, using visual distributional models, it is possible to extract meaningful information and to effectively capture the semantic similarity between verbs.