Semantic diversity is best measured with unscaled vectors: Reply to Cevoli, Watkins and Rastle (2020).

ABSTRACT: Semantic diversity refers to the degree of semantic variability in the contexts in which a particular word is used. We have previously proposed a method for measuring semantic diversity based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). In a recent paper, Cevoli et al. (2020) attempted to replicate our method and obtained different semantic diversity values. They suggested that this discrepancy occurred because they scaled their LSA vectors by their singular values, while we did not. Using their new results, they argued that semantic diversity is not related to ambiguity in word meaning, as we originally proposed. In this reply, we demonstrate that the use of unscaled vectors provides better fits to human semantic judgements than scaled ones. Thus we argue that our original semantic diversity measur

SUBMITTER: Hoffman P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9374602 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature