@inproceedings{a-rodriguez-merlo-2020-word,
    title = "Word associations and the distance properties of context-aware word embeddings",
    author = "A. Rodriguez, Maria  and
      Merlo, Paola",
    editor = "Fern{\'a}ndez, Raquel  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2020.conll-1.30/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.30",
    pages = "376--385",
    abstract = "What do people know when they know the meaning of words? Word associations have been widely used to tap into lexical repre- sentations and their structure, as a way of probing semantic knowledge in humans. We investigate whether current word embedding spaces (contextualized and uncontextualized) can be considered good models of human lexi- cal knowledge by studying whether they have comparable characteristics to human associa- tion spaces. We study the three properties of association rank, asymmetry of similarity and triangle inequality. We find that word embeddings are good mod- els of some word associations properties. They replicate well human associations between words, and, like humans, their context-aware variants show violations of the triangle in- equality. While they do show asymmetry of similarities, their asymmetries do not map those of human association norms."
}