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Bridging the theoretical gap between semantic representation models without the pressure of a ranking: some lessons learnt from LSA

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Abstract

In recent years, latent semantic analysis (LSA) has reached a level of maturity at which its presence is ubiquitous in technology as well as in simulation of cognitive processes. In spite of this, in recent years there has been a trend of subjecting LSA to some criticisms, usually because it is compared to other models in very specific tasks and conditions and sometimes without having good knowledge of what the semantic representation of LSA means, and without exploiting all the possibilities of which LSA is capable other than the cosine. This paper provides a critical review to clarify some of the misunderstandings regarding LSA and other space models. The historical stability of the predecessors of LSA, the representational structure of word meaning and the multiple topologies that could arise from a semantic space, the computation of similarity, the myth that LSA dimensions have no meaning, the computational and algorithm plausibility to account for meaning acquisition in LSA (in contrast to others models based on online mechanisms), the possibilities of spatial models to substantiate recent proposals, and, in general, the characteristics of classic vector models and their ease and flexibility to simulate some cognitive phenomena will be reviewed. The review highlights the similarity between LSA and other techniques and proposes using long LSA experiences in other models, especially in predicting models such as word2vec. In sum, it emphasizes the lessons that can be learned from comparing LSA-based models to other models, rather than making statements about “the best.”

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Notes

  1. The construction–integration model proposed by Kintsch is a spreading activation algorithm. First, a net is constructed with the neighbors of the words in a text. That net is expressed in a matrix which contains the similarities between each neighbor with the others. This matrix is iteratively multiplied by a vector that represents a meaning hypothesis. This process is carried out until the net is stable, in other words, until the change in the mean of the vector activation is lower than a parameterized value. The number of cycles is then the cycle when that value is reached (see Kintsch and Welsch 1991 for details of the original conception).

  2. LSA usually requires more RAM than other models, but math libraries use to implement sparse matrices classes (with no zero entries) to perform the SVD calculations. This makes it possible to analyze big corpora in ordinary computers. Modern engines for large-scale data processing such as Spark allow for larger corpora as well. We assume that Gamallo and Bordag did not use high-performance techniques in that study.

  3. The context unit in LSA is usually misunderstood. Influenced by the information retrieval field and the constrictions of the formats of some software packages, many researchers consider that LSA uses only whole documents (reports, chapters, sections, books, etc.) as a unit of analysis. For this reason, many studies use only that kind of document as context in the initial word-context matrix. This is not accurate. Paragraphs could be a better alternative for cognitive studies. The classical work of Landauer and Dumais (1997) already used paragraphs.

  4. In David Marr’s levels of analysis, the computational level specifies what the system does, that is, the calculations that it performs. The algorithmic level describes how the system performs the calculations at the computational level, that is, it describes the formal representation for the input and output, and the algorithm (functions) for the transformation. The implementational/physical level describes how the representation and algorithm can be realized physically. However, the difference between computational and algorithmic levels is not too clear. Sometimes, computational descriptions are close to algorithmic ones and vice versa.

  5. To calculate Sim(Jamaica, Russia) and Sim(Russia, Jamaica) in Tversky’s (1977) assumption, we must to adjust a set of parameters in its mathematical formula. To do that, we must to identify a priori which word has more features, Russia or Jamaica (if we know more about Russia or about Jamaica) and in what proportion. We think that identifying such parameters values in that formula using an LSA space representation of words would be automatic, because the vector length provides information about word familiarity (an indirect measure of features in a word).

  6. However, note that arbitrary parameterization could result in an over-fitting situation, where modelers pick some parameters that result in a big adjustment to the cognitive process they are interested in, but the same parameters perform badly when accounting for more general cognitive phenomena. This is an open debate about modularization and generalization.

  7. The fact that distributional models as LSA are currently textl-based does not mean that distributional models must be by definition exclusively linguistic. Lenci (2008) remarks that the contextual hypothesis that defines distributional models is not restricted to features extracted from linguistic context alone and could contain extralinguistic features as context (visual, emotional, communicative situations, etc). Probably, something similar to LSA can be applied to perceptual realities, as has been done with SVD or principal components for face and gesture recognition (Chin et al. 2006; Turk and Pentland 1991). Nonetheless, in this paper, to follow the argumentation of the presented studies, we consider that distributional models are exclusively textual-based only.

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Acknowledgements

Some ideas of this paper were presented orally in the Psychology of Thinking and Comprehension: International Meeting in Honor of Prof. Juan Antonio García Madruga. We want to thank to the organization and to Prof. García Madruga for inviting us to debate these ideas. The presentation (Spanish) is in: https://canal.uned.es/video/5a6fa16eb1111f636a8b45bc.

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  1. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Juan del Rosal, nº 10, 28023, Madrid, Spain

    Guillermo Jorge-Botana & José María Luzón

  2. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco, C/Iván Pavlov, s/n., 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Ricardo Olmos

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  1. Guillermo Jorge-Botana
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Jorge-Botana, G., Olmos, R. & Luzón, J.M. Bridging the theoretical gap between semantic representation models without the pressure of a ranking: some lessons learnt from LSA. Cogn Process 21, 1–21 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-019-00934-x

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