Concept Representations in Vector Space: Quantifying Sharedness and Idiosyncrasy of Meaning
Concepts are the basic units through which we navigate the world and communicate meaning. But do you and I really mean the same thing when we think or speak about a concept? The present study develops a measurement framework for modeling and analyzing interindividual variation in concept representations through sentence embeddings, dense vector representations mapping entire utterances into a shared geometric space. The framework is developed in a theoretical argument and validated, demonstrated, and subjected to robustness checks in a pre-registered study. Short personal definitions, elicited from $N = 125$ participants, are encoded as sentence embeddings and submitted pairwise to a cros...
| Authors | Simon Josef Durstewitz, Denis Buehler |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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