Applying German word vectors to assess flexibility performance in the associative fluency task.

Abstract

The traditional, multidimensional assessment of divergent thinking in creativity research often includes the metrics of fluency, originality, and flexibility. Whereas there are objective means to assess fluency and originality, flexibility is often subjectively rated, hence influenced by interindividual variations in the perception of semantic similarities. Given that flexibility is recognized as one of the most important aspects of creative work, it appears relevant to introduce a framework for its more objective evaluation. The use of word vectors as an objective and automatized measure of creativity is a rapidly emerging field. In this study, in an attempt to objectify the assessment of flexibility, word vectors of the German language were applied to quantify the semantic similarity of words. To this end, a word vector model was trained on a diverse 0.67-billion-word German text corpus. The validity of the self-trained model was demonstrated on three data sets of human word similarity judgments whereby its performance was in line with the performance of publicly available pretrained word vectors. Additionally, synonymous words were linked and assigned to the same vector to reduce the overestimation of flexibility among synonymous answers. Two different metrics to calculate a final flexibility value were discussed, allowing an individually tailored assessment of participants' flexibility performances. Overall, this objective flexibility assessment tool for the German language can complement the fluency and originality scores and thus contribute to a more time-and cost-effective assessment of an objective multidimensional divergent thinking performance in creativity research.