ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Semantic embeddings reveal and address taxonomic incommensurability in psychological measurement.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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.
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.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-report measures of subjective time: An overview of existing measures and their semantic similarities.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Deep Semantics Analysis for Scale Development: Replicating Psychometrics Validation Process with Large Language Models.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Large language models accurately identify decision reasons in verbal reports.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A validity-guided workflow for robust large language model research in psychology.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Generative psychometrics via AI-GENIE: Automatic item generation and validation with network-integrated evaluation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Escaping the Jingle-Jangle Jungle: Increasing Conceptual Clarity in Psychology Using Large Language Models.Current directions in psychological science · 2026Article
- Language or syndrome? Investigating the origins of the general psychopathology factor through large language model embeddings.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2026Article
- Human Expertise and Large Language Model Embeddings in the Content Validity Assessment of Personality Tests.Educational and psychological measurement · 2026Article
- Psychometric applications of generative artificial intelligence: Lifecycle, risks, and research agenda.PLOS mental health · 2026Review
- Beyond redundancy: rethinking construct proliferation through meaning, practice, and taxonomy.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Analysis of conceptual overlap among formal thought disorder rating scales in psychosis: a systematic semantic synthesis.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Observer-Independent Assessment of Content Overlap in Mental Health Questionnaires: Large Language Model-Based Study.JMIR AI · 2025Article
- Statistics is not measurement: The inbuilt semantics of psychometric scales and language-based models obscures crucial epistemic differences.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Taxonomic incommensurability denotes the difficulty in comparing scientific theories due to different uses of concepts and operationalizations. To tackle this problem in psychology, here we use language models to obtain semantic embeddings representing psychometric items, scales and construct labels in a vector space. This approach allows us to analyse different datasets (for example, the International Personality Item Pool) spanning thousands of items and hundreds of scales and constructs and show that embeddings can be used to predict empirical relations between measures, automatically detect taxonomic fallacies and suggest more parsimonious taxonomies. These findings suggest that semantic embeddings constitute a powerful tool for tackling taxonomic incommensurability in the psychological sciences.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.