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Contexto: Find the Secret Word

contexto.me

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Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#11

Post by nerdponx »

Zanni wrote: post #4

Interesting. Took me way too long to realize that "close" is measured semantically, not lexically. A good strategy is to go up and down the ladder of abstraction, e.g. if "car" is close, try "engine" and "vehicle."

The semantic similarity is not always sensible, either. The underlying model needs some work.

(spoilers for today below)

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These are some of my guesses for today, in order of similarity:

  kilometer 3501
  authority 3149
  tomato    2960
  exercise  2357
  fruit     2008
  healthy   1715
  run        972
  input      927
  power      909
  foot       598
  meter      300
  control    159
Ugh! I feel like I'm blindly stumbling around a maze of puns, or a Saturday NY Times crossword full of eye-rolling clues. It just feels like unsystematic guessing at what the semantic similarity model might contain.

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#12

Post by rubslopes »

I don't think it works very well. Trying not to give too much of a spoiler, today's Portuguese word is a noun. When I tried the "verb form" of that noun, I got a score of 207. This led me away from the correct word. I finally got it right in 30 guesses.

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#14

Post by jasonjmcghee »

mmastrac wrote: post #9

I find these to be less-than-ideal puzzles. For example, (no spoilers) today's puzzle answer is an abstract concept X, and two very common examples of X score both higher and lower (83 vs 7) than words that are much further away IMO (29).

Semantle (of which this appears to be a clone) uses cosine similarity with word2vec from my understanding and it felt much more intuitive.

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#15

Post by eternalban »

mmastrac wrote: post #9

I find these to be less-than-ideal puzzles. For example, (no spoilers) today's puzzle answer is an abstract concept X, and two very common examples of X score both higher and lower (83 vs 7) than words that are much further away IMO (29).

It's interesting that it works. (179->150->13->1 for me. [I think it is more interesting to discuss paths instead of x and neighbors. A graph plotting all successful paths so far would be ++interesting to see. I wonder if a certain common final sub-path (like above) occur. And which one is it?])

Can we actually assert a 'natural semantic order'? I've always thought this was a fundamental aspect of our cognition, that we have 2 distinct ways of ordering: names and numbers. Outside of lexical ordering (which is ordering a representation not the things themselves), names can at best be ordered in a DAG. Pretty much half of computer science is converting names into numbers so we can compute over them.

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#17

Post by thornewolf »

rubslopes wrote: post #12

I don't think it works very well. Trying not to give too much of a spoiler, today's Portuguese word is a noun. When I tried the "verb form" of that noun, I got a score of 207. This led me away from the correct word. I finally got it right in 30 guesses.

That's a tough problem when generating word embeddings. Bodies of text will rarely write "walking walk" or "the dancing dance" consequently leading naïve implementations to consider them unrelated.

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#19

Post by thornewolf »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #16

It’s a little janky. My word was “temperature”. I got to “water” (no. 29) and then got stuck. Words leading up to it were rain, cloud, storm. Hard to take the leap from there to “temperature”

You might want to remove the word for spoiler's sake. It is the same for everyone, like Wordle

Re: Contexto: Find the Secret Word

#20

Post by James_Henry »

dfc wrote: post #18

It's weird that Celsius, Kelvin and Fahrenheit were so far apart.

It's because it's not based on a simple measure of the similarity of meaning of the words. It's based on how often the words are used next to each other, which means that since celsius is used more often with the word temperature in the corpus, it will be closer to the word temperature.
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