Tell Me Why: Computational Explanation of Conceptual Similarity Judgments

In this paper we introduce a system for the computation of explanations that accompany scores in the conceptual similarity task. In this setting the problem is, given a pair of concepts, to provide a score that expresses in how far the two concepts are similar. In order to explain how explanations are automatically built, we illustrate some basic features of COVER, the lexical resource that underlies our approach, and the main traits of the MeRaLi system, that computes conceptual similarity and explanations, all in one. To assess the computed explanations, we have designed a human experimentation, that provided interesting and encouraging results, which we report and discuss in depth.