Predicting human similarity judgments with distributional models: The value of word associations

Abstract

Most distributional lexico-semantic models derive their representations based on external language resources such as text corpora. In this study, we propose that internal language models, that are more closely aligned to the mental representations of words could provide important insights into cognitive science, including linguistics. Doing so allows us to reflect upon theoretical questions regarding the structure of the mental lexicon, and also puts into perspective a number of assumptions underlying recently proposed distributional text-based models. In particular, we focus on word-embedding models which have been proposed to learn aspects of word meaning in a manner similar to humans. The..