We take a closer look at van Tiel et al.’s (2016) experimental results on diversity
in scalar inference rates. In contrast to their finding that semantic similarity had no significant
effect on scalar inference rates, we show that a sufficiently fine-grained notion of semantic
similarity does have an effect: the more similar the two terms on a scale, the lower the scalar
inference rate. Moreover, we show that a context-sensitive notion of semantic similarity (in
particular ELMo; Peters et al., ...
We take a closer look at van Tiel et al.’s (2016) experimental results on diversity
in scalar inference rates. In contrast to their finding that semantic similarity had no significant
effect on scalar inference rates, we show that a sufficiently fine-grained notion of semantic
similarity does have an effect: the more similar the two terms on a scale, the lower the scalar
inference rate. Moreover, we show that a context-sensitive notion of semantic similarity (in
particular ELMo; Peters et al., 2018) can explain more of the variance in the data, but only
modestly, only for stimuli that contain informative context words, and only when the scalar
terms themselves are sufficiently context-sensitive.
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