Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35422527›Full record

ArticleNature human behaviour2022

Semantic projection recovers rich human knowledge of multiple object features from word embeddings.

Gabriel Grand, Idan Asher Blank, Francisco Pereira, Evelina Fedorenko

Open access · greenAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
58citing papers in PubMed
21.8field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

58 citing papers in PubMed, 168 citations in OpenAlex.

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  10. What makes memories vivid?Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026
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  14. Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026
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  15. Article
  16. Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  17. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.

Gabriel Grand *Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.ORCID 0000-0003-1920-0021
Idan Asher Blank *Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. iblank@psych.ucla.edu.ORCID 0000-0001-7057-8391
Francisco PereiraNational Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Evelina FedorenkoDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.ORCID 0000-0003-3823-514X
IIT@MIT · USMcGovern Institute for Brain Research · USNational Institute of Mental Health · USUCLA Health · US

Funding

Machine Learning TeamZICMH002968 · NIMH · NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH · PI PEREIRA, FRANCISCO · 2018 to 2025
$13.9M
Functional reorganization of the language and domain-general multiple demand systems in aphasiaR01DC016950 · NIDCD · BOSTON UNIVERSITY (CHARLES RIVER CAMPUS) · PI FEDORENKO, EVELINA, KIRAN, SWATHI · 2019 to 2023
$3.2M
The neural architecture of pragmatic processingR01DC016607 · NIDCD · MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · PI FEDORENKO, EVELINA · 2018 to 2022
$2.4M
Intramural NIH HHS ZIC MH002968NIDCD NIH HHS R01 DC016607NIDCD NIH HHS R01 DC016950
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

How is knowledge about word meaning represented in the mental lexicon? Current computational models infer word meanings from lexical co-occurrence patterns. They learn to represent words as vectors in a multidimensional space, wherein words that are used in more similar linguistic contexts-that is, are more semantically related-are located closer together. However, whereas inter-word proximity captures only overall relatedness, human judgements are highly context dependent. For example, dolphins and alligators are similar in size but differ in dangerousness. Here, we use a domain-general method to extract context-dependent relationships from word embeddings: 'semantic projection' of word-vectors onto lines that represent features such as size (the line connecting the words 'small' and 'big') or danger ('safe' to 'dangerous'), analogous to 'mental scales'. This method recovers human judgements across various object categories and properties. Thus, the geometry of word embeddings explicitly represents a wealth of context-dependent world knowledge.

Indexed as

Machine LearningSemanticsHumansJudgmentKnowledge

Identifiers

PMID35422527
PMCPMC10349641
OpenAlexW4223947928

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.