Word meaning in minds and machines

Understand

Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

• Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological judgments such as similarity, association, priming, and comprehension, raising the question of whether the models could serve as psychological theories.
• In this article, we compare how humans and machines represent the meaning of words.
• We argue that contemporary NLP systems are fairly successful models of human word similarity, but they fall short in many other respects.