Distributional vectors encode referential attributes

Distributional methods have proven to excel at capturing fuzzy, graded aspects of meaning (Italy is more similar to Spain than to Germany). In contrast, it is difficult to extract the values of more specific attributes of word referents from distributional representations, attributes of the kind typically found in structured knowledge bases (Italy has 60 million inhabitants). In this paper, we pursue the hypothesis that distributional vectors also implicitly encode referential attributes.