将人类概念生产中的语义导航表征为嵌入空间中的轨迹 / Characterizing Human Semantic Navigation in Concept Production as Trajectories in Embedding Space
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文提出了一种新方法,将人类在思考时联想概念的过程比作在语义空间中‘行走’的轨迹,并通过计算轨迹的几何和动态指标来量化这一过程,从而能够区分不同人群(如临床患者)和概念类型,为认知研究和人工智能评估提供了新工具。
Semantic representations can be framed as a structured, dynamic knowledge space through which humans navigate to retrieve and manipulate meaning. To investigate how humans traverse this geometry, we introduce a framework that represents concept production as navigation through embedding space. Using different transformer text embedding models, we construct participant-specific semantic trajectories based on cumulative embeddings and extract geometric and dynamical metrics, including distance to next, distance to centroid, entropy, velocity, and acceleration. These measures capture both scalar and directional aspects of semantic navigation, providing a computationally grounded view of semantic representation search as movement in a geometric space. We evaluate the framework on four datasets across different languages, spanning different property generation tasks: Neurodegenerative, Swear verbal fluency, Property listing task in Italian, and in German. Across these contexts, our approach distinguishes between clinical groups and concept types, offering a mathematical framework that requires minimal human intervention compared to typical labor-intensive linguistic pre-processing methods. Comparison with a non-cumulative approach reveals that cumulative embeddings work best for longer trajectories, whereas shorter ones may provide too little context, favoring the non-cumulative alternative. Critically, different embedding models yielded similar results, highlighting similarities between different learned representations despite different training pipelines. By framing semantic navigation as a structured trajectory through embedding space, bridging cognitive modeling with learned representation, thereby establishing a pipeline for quantifying semantic representation dynamics with applications in clinical research, cross-linguistic analysis, and the assessment of artificial cognition.
将人类概念生产中的语义导航表征为嵌入空间中的轨迹 / Characterizing Human Semantic Navigation in Concept Production as Trajectories in Embedding Space
这篇论文提出了一种新方法,将人类在思考时联想概念的过程比作在语义空间中‘行走’的轨迹,并通过计算轨迹的几何和动态指标来量化这一过程,从而能够区分不同人群(如临床患者)和概念类型,为认知研究和人工智能评估提供了新工具。
源自 arXiv: 2602.05971