'Change is Key!' hosts Simon De Deyne for a talk about measuring meaning in mental lexicons

Change is Key! invites the public to a presentation and subsequent discussion with cognitive scientist Simon De Deyne from the university of Melbourne on LLMs and mental sense representations. The talk takes place on Monday, 29th September 2025, 13:15-15:00 at Campus Humanisten (Renströmsgatan 6, 412 55 Gothenburg), C452.

Title: Measuring Meaning in Mental Lexicons in the Age of Large Language Models

Abstract:

Word associations are a powerful and unique tool to measure how meaning is organised in the mental lexicon. Several recent studies have demonstrated that this method can be scaled efficiently to investigate diverse dimensions of lexical processing and semantic cognition across multiple languages, language variants, and language modalities. At the same time, massive associative models trained on large sections of human language, such as Large Language Models, have become very successful at capturing the formal aspects of language and predicting semantic cognition as well. In this talk, I assess the opportunities and limitations of both approaches. I will first give an overview of word association research developments that came out of the Small World of Words project and explain how word associations are measured, what aspects of our language and lived experience they capture, and what this implies for how meaning is organised in the lexicon. The second part of the talk on new ways of quantifying semantic and conceptual diversity within and between languages Finally, I will discuss new directions and ongoing work using large language models to generate and annotate associations, creating rich contextualised knowledge graphs that approximate cultural schemata.