# Are distributional representations ready for the real world? Evaluating word vectors for grounded perceptual meaning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.11168 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.11168/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2017.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts, and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.