Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are substantially var-ied in the types of semantic similarity that they output. Despitethis high variance, the different types of similarity are oftenconflated as a monolithic concept in models of behaviouraldata. We apply the insight that word2vec’s representationscan be used for capturing both paradigmatic similarity (sub-stitutability) and syntagmatic similarity (co-occurrence) to twosets of experimental findings (semantic priming and the effectof semantic neighbourhood density) that have previously beenmodeled with monolithic conceptions of DSM-based seman-tic similarity. Using paradigmatic and syntagmatic similaritybased on word2vec, we show that for some tasks and typesof items the two types of similarity play complementary ex-planatory roles, whereas for others, only syntagmatic similar-ity seems to matter. These findings remind us that it is im-portant to develop more precise accounts of what we believeour DSMs represent, and provide us with novel perspectiveson established behavioural patterns.