Attempting to derive models of semantic memory using
psychometric techniques has a long history in cognitive
psychology dating back at least to Osgood (1957). Many others
have used multidimensional scaling on human judgements of
similarity (e.g., Shepard, 1962, 1974; Rips, Shoben, & Smith,
1973; Schvaneveldt, 1990). Recently, a small group of
investigators have been using large corpora, 1 million to 500
million words, to develop cognitively plausible
high-dimensional semantic models without the need for human
judgements on stimuli. These models have become increasingly
better at explaining a wide range of cognitive pheno
