@inproceedings{barak-etal-2019-context,
    title = "Context Effects on Human Judgments of Similarity",
    author = "Barak, Libby  and
      Kong-Johnson, Noe  and
      Goldberg, Adele",
    editor = "Axelrod, Amittai  and
      Yang, Diyi  and
      Cunha, Rossana  and
      Shaikh, Samira  and
      Waseem, Zeerak",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/W19-3642/",
    pages = "135--137",
    abstract = "The semantic similarity of words forms the basis of many natural language processing methods. These computational similarity measures are often based on a mathematical comparison of vector representations of word meanings, while human judgments of similarity differ in lacking geometrical properties, e.g., symmetric similarity and triangular similarity. In this study, we propose a novel task design to further explore human behavior by asking whether a pair of words is deemed more similar depending on an immediately preceding judgment. Results from a crowdsourcing experiment show that people consistently judge words as more similar when primed by a judgment that evokes a relevant relationship. Our analysis further shows that word2vec similarity correlated significantly better with the out-of-context judgments, thus confirming the methodological differences in human-computer judgments, and offering a new testbed for probing the differences."
}