Word meaning in minds and machines

Machines show an increasingly broad set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many algorithms stem from past computational work in psychology, raising the question of whether they understand words as people do. In this paper, we compare how humans and machines represent the meaning of words. We argue that contemporary NLP systems are promising models of human word similarity, but they fall short in many other respects. Current models are too strongly linked to the text-based patterns in large corpora, and too weakly linked to the desires, goals, and beliefs that people use words in order to express. Word meanings must also be grounded in vision and action, and capable of flexible combinations, in ways that current systems are not. We pose concrete challenges for developing machines with a more human-like, conceptual basis for word meaning. We also discuss implications for cognitive science and NLP.