Investigating the Extent to which Distributional Semantic Models Capture a Broad Range of Semantic Relations.Kevin S. Brown,Eiling Yee,Gitte Joergensen,Melissa Troyer,Elliot Saltzman,Jay Rueckl,James S. Magnuson &Ken McRae -2023 -Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13291.detailsDistributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) (...) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract–concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb–noun thematic role relations and noun–noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations. (shrink)
Language as a mental travel guide.Charles P. Davis,Gerry T. M. Altmann &Eiling Yee -2020 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43:e125.detailsGilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.
Psychology of cleansing through the prism of intersecting object histories.Zachary Ekves,Yanina Prystauka,Charles P. Davis,Eiling Yee &Gerry T. M. Altmann -2021 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44.detailsWe link cleansing effects to contemporary cognitive theories via an account of event representation that provides an explicit, neurally plausible mechanism for encoding objects and their associations across time. It explains separation as resulting from weakening associations between the self in the present and the self in the past.