# Cognitive and Cultural Topology of Linguistic Categories:A Semantic-Pragmatic Metric Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06876/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Poincar'e Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08039/) (2017)
- [Hyperbolic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09112/) (2018)
- [Representation Tradeoffs for Hyperbolic Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03329/) (2018)
- [Embedding Text in Hyperbolic Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04313/) (2018)
- [Do language models learn typicality judgments from text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02987/) (2021)
- [Is a Single Vector Enough? Exploring Node Polysemy for Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10668/) (2019)
- [Semantic categories of artifacts and animals reflect efficient coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04562/) (2019)
- [Variation and generality in encoding of syntactic anomaly information in sentence embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06644/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, the field of NLP has seen growing interest in modeling both semantic and pragmatic dimensions. Despite this progress, two key challenges persist: firstly, the complex task of mapping and analyzing the interactions between semantic and pragmatic features; secondly, the insufficient incorporation of relevant insights from related disciplines outside NLP. Addressing these issues, this study introduces a novel geometric metric that utilizes word co-occurrence patterns. This metric maps two fundamental properties - semantic typicality (cognitive) and pragmatic salience (socio-cultural) - for basic-level categories within a two-dimensional hyperbolic space. Our evaluations reveal that this semantic-pragmatic metric produces mappings for basic-level categories that not only surpass traditional cognitive semantics benchmarks but also demonstrate significant socio-cultural relevance. This finding proposes that basic-level categories, traditionally viewed as semantics-driven cognitive constructs, should be examined through the lens of both semantic and pragmatic dimensions, highlighting their role as a cognitive-cultural interface. The broad contribution of this paper lies in the development of medium-sized, interpretable, and human-centric language embedding models, which can effectively blend semantic and pragmatic dimensions to elucidate both the cognitive and socio-cultural significance of linguistic categories.