Predicting Patterns of Similarity Among Abstract Semantic Relations

Event Information

Recording

Available

Host

Analogical Minds

Duration

30 minutes

Abstract

In this talk, I will present some data showing that people’s similarity judgments among word pairs reflect distinctions between abstract semantic relations like contrast, cause-effect, or part-whole. Further, the extent that individual participants’ similarity judgments discriminate between abstract semantic relations was linearly associated with both fluid and crystallized verbal intelligence, albeit more strongly with fluid intelligence. Finally, I will compare three models according to their ability to predict these similarity judgments. All models take as input vector representations of individual word meanings, but they differ in their representation of relations: one model does not represent relations at all, a second model represents relations implicitly, and a third model represents relations explicitly. Across the three models, the third model served as the best predictor of human similarity judgments suggesting the importance of explicit relation representation to fully account for human semantic cognition.

Topics

abstract relations abstract semantic relations cause-effect contrast crystallized intelligence fluid intelligence part-whole semantic cognition semantics similarity judgments verbal intelligence word pairs

Predicting Patterns of Similarity Among Abstract Semantic Relations

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