Not so much in psych, where language remains a pretty fundamental mystery, but from the philosophy of language side, word embeddings are, I think it's fair to s

Not so much in psych, where language remains a pretty fundamental mystery, but from the philosophy of language side, word embeddings are, I think it's fair to say, fundamentally an implementation of Sassurian structuralism and semiotics. Words (signs) have no intrinsic, native meaning. And so, the only way to figure out which one is which is by measuring it in relation to all other signs in the lexicon; that is to say, words only mean something because they don't mean all the other things, and that the Structure as a whole is what provides meaning. There has been much in the way of discussion for, and concern about (for example, the Deconstructionist movement), these ideas, for the past 60 years or so. And a bit of practical exploration in the field of child development. Interestingly, the fact that embeddings between languages seem to share some common shapes (per the linked paper in this thread), would seem to suggest that A) Fundamentally, most languages have the same deep structure, whether through coincidence or common evolutionary root. or B) The brain has a hard-wired structure for language, evolved alongside the development of language itself. The Chomskian Language Acquisition Device. We're not born tabula rasa, we've got some hardcoding indicating how we're going to understand things Or a little of A, a little of B maybe, as it does end up being a boostrapping problem.