“I am a junior undergraduate student majoring in linguistics and have recently started conducting brain imaging studies. . . .” | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

I am a junior undergraduate student majoring in linguistics and have recently started conducting brain imaging studies. Yesterday, I came across a paper published in Nature Human Behavior by Grand, Blank, Pereira, and Fedorenko that raised several concerns for me. The paper attempts to find word-embedding using Amazon Mechanical Turk, or, in their words, “investigates context-dependent knowledge using semantic projection in word embeddings”, but the methodology might have a few issues. Take the simplest example, regarding the use of Pearson’s correlation as an evaluation measure for concept acquisition, which might be potentially misleading. The acquisition process for linguistic concepts with multiple dimensions might involve phase transitions, and Pearson’s correlation, especially when outliers are smoothed out, measures the linear relationship between variables. It might not capture the nonlinear nuances of such phase transitions. I thought you might be interested in this paper, as

I am a junior undergraduate student majoring in linguistics and have recently started conducting brain imaging studies. Yesterday, I came across a paper published in Nature Human Behavior by Grand, Blank, Pereira, and Fedorenko that raised several concerns for me. The paper attempts to find word-embedding using Amazon Mechanical Turk, or, in their words, “investigates context-dependent knowledge using semantic projection in word embeddings”, but the methodology might have a few issues. Take the simplest example, regarding the use of Pearson’s correlation as an evaluation measure for concept ac