Models of Semantic Memory

Meaning is a fundamental component of nearly all aspects of human cognition, but formal models of semantic memory have classically lagged behind many other areas of cognition. However, computational models of semantic memory have seen a surge of progress in the last two decades, advancing our knowledge of how meaning is constructed from experience, how knowledge is represented and used, and what processes are likely to be culprit in disorders characterized by semantic impairment. This chapter provides an overview of several recent clusters of models and trends in the literature, including modern connectionist and distributional models of semantic memory, and contemporary advances in grounding semantic models with perceptual information and models of compositional semantics. Several common lessons have emerged from both the connectionist and distributional literatures, and we attempt to synthesize these themes to better focus future developments in semantic modeling.