  Semantic networks provide a useful tool to understand how related concepts
are retrieved from memory. However, most current network approaches use
pairwise links to represent memory recall patterns. Pairwise connections
neglect higher-order associations, i.e. relationships between more than two
concepts at a time. These higher-order interactions might covariate with (and
thus contain information about) how similar concepts are along psycholinguistic
dimensions like arousal, valence, familiarity, gender and others. We overcome
these limits by introducing feature-rich cognitive hypergraphs as quantitative
models of human memory where: (i) concepts recalled together can all engage in
hyperlinks involving also more than two concepts at once (cognitive hypergraph
aspect), and (ii) each concept is endowed with a vector of psycholinguistic
features (feature-rich aspect). We build hypergraphs from word association data
and use evaluation methods from machine learning features to predict concept
concreteness. Since concepts with similar concreteness tend to cluster together
in human memory, we expect to be able to leverage this structure. Using word
association data from the Small World of Words dataset, we compared a pairwise
network and a hypergraph with N=3586 concepts/nodes. Interpretable artificial
intelligence models trained on (1) psycholinguistic features only, (2)
pairwise-based feature aggregations, and on (3) hypergraph-based aggregations
show significant differences between pairwise and hypergraph links.
Specifically, our results show that higher-order and feature-rich hypergraph
models contain richer information than pairwise networks leading to improved
prediction of word concreteness. The relation with previous studies about
conceptual clustering and compartmentalisation in associative knowledge and
human memory are discussed.
