Cognitively Motivated Distributional Representations of Meaning

Although meaning is at the core of human cognition, state-of-the-art distributional semantic models (DSMs) are often agnostic to the findings in the area of semantic cognition. In this work, we present a novel type of DSMs motivated by the dual–processing cognitive perspective that is triggered by lexico–semantic activations in the short–term human memory. The proposed model is shown to perform better than state-of-the-art models for computing semantic similarity between words. The fusion of different types of DSMs is also investigated achieving results that are comparable or better than the state-of-the-art. The used corpora along with a set of tools, as well as large repositories of vectorial word representations are made publicly available for four languages (English, German, Italian, and