We choose distributional semantics (Erk, 2012) as our frame of reference, as it produces continuous similarity scores, in line with the graded nature of the modification effects we are investigating.
we look at the compositional extension of distributional semantics (Baroni, 2013), because we need representations not only for words, but also phrases, and we adopt the asymmetric similarity measures developed in the literature on lexical entailment (Kotlerman et al., 2010;Lenci and Benotto, 2012), because we are interested in an asymmetric relation (to what extent the concept denoted by the phrase is a good instance of the target class, and not vice versa).