The principals of meaning: Extracting semantic dimensions from co-occurrence models of semantics

Geoff Hollis, Chris Westbury

Notable progress has been made recently on computational models of semantics using vector representations for word meaning (Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). As representations of meaning, recent models presumably hone in on plausible organizational principles for meaning. We performed an analysis on the organization of the skip-gram model's semantic space. Consistent with human performance (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), the skip-gram model primarily relies on affective distinctions to organize meaning. We showed that the skip-gram model accounts for unique variance in behavioral measures of lexical access above and beyond that accounted for by affective and lexical measures. We also raised the possibility that word frequency predicts behavioral measures of lexical access due to the fact that word use is organized by semantics. Deconstruction of the semantic representations in semantic models has the potential to reveal organizing principles of human semantics.