Westera, MatthijsGupta, AbhijeeBoleda, GemmaPadó, Sebastian2021-09-272021-09-272021Westera M, Gupta A, Boleda G, Padó S. Distributional models of category concepts based on names of category members. Cognitive science. 2021;45:e13029. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.130290364-0213http://hdl.handle.net/10230/48504Cognitive scientists have long used distributional semantic representations of categories. The predominant approach uses distributional representations of category-denoting nouns, such as “city” for the category city. We propose a novel scheme that represents categories as prototypes over representations of names of its members, such as “Barcelona,” “Mumbai,” and “Wuhan” for the category city. This name-based representation empirically outperforms the noun-based representation on two experiments (modeling human judgments of category relatedness and predicting category membership) with particular improvements for ambiguous nouns. We discuss the model complexity of both classes of models and argue that the name-based model has superior explanatory potential with regard to concept acquisition.application/pdfengThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License,which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited andis not used for commercial purposesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13029ConceptsDistributional semanticsPrototype theoryAmbiguityRelatednessinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess