Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We demonstrate that distributed vector representations are capable of hierarchical reasoning by summing sets of vectors representing hyponyms (subordinate concepts) to yield a vector that resembles the associated hypernym (superordinate concept). These distributed vector representations constitute a potentially neurally plausible model while demonstrating a high level of performance in many different cognitive tasks. Experiments were run using DVRS, a word embedding system designed for the Sigma cognitive architecture, and Word2Vec, a state-of-the-art word embedding system. These results contribute to a growing body of work demonstrating the various tasks on which distributed vector representations perform competently.