Within-concept similarities in a taxonomy: a corpus linguistic approach *

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation . Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.