Querying Word Embeddings for Similarity and Relatedness

AbstractWord embeddings obtained from neural network models such as Word2Vec Skipgram have become popular representations of word meaning and have been evaluated on a variety of word similarity and relatedness norming data. Skipgram generates a set of word and context embeddings, the latter typically discarded after training. We demonstrate the usefulness of context embeddings in predicting asymmetric association between words from a recently published dataset of production norms (Jouravlev & McRae, 2016). Our findings suggest that humans respond with words closer to the cue within the context embedding space (rather than the word embedding space), when asked to generate thematically related words.