  Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to
build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy
widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether
they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this
paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and
conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets
sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word
representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts,
and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction
errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language
learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.
