Grammar or Crammer? The Role of Morphology in Distinguishing Orthographically Similar but Semantically Unrelated Words

We show that n-gram-based distributional models fail to distinguish unrelated words due to the noise in semantic spaces. This issue remains hidden in conventional benchmarks but becomes more pronounced when orthographic similarity is high. To highlight this problem, we introduce OSimUnr, a dataset of nearly one million English and Turkish word-pairs that are orthographically similar but semantically unrelated (e.g., grammar – crammer). These pairs are generated through a graph-based WordNet approach and morphological resources. We define two evaluation tasks—unrelatedness identification and relatedness classification—to test semantic models. Our experiments reveal that FastText, with default n-gram segmentation, performs poorly (below 5% accuracy) in identifying unrelated words. However, morphological segmentation overcomes this issue, boosting accuracy to 68% (English) and 71% (Turkish) without compromising performance on standard benchmarks (RareWords, MTurk771, MEN, AnlamVer). Furthermore, our results suggest that even state-of-the-art LLMs, including Llama 3.3 and GPT-4o-mini, may exhibit noise in their semantic spaces, particularly in highly synthetic languages such as Turkish. To ensure dataset quality, we leverage WordNet, MorphoLex, and NLTK, covering fully derivational morphology supporting atomic roots (e.g., ‘-co_here+ance+y’ for ‘coherency’), with 405 affixes in Turkish and 467 in English.