One important tool used by psychologists to look into similarity is computer modeling. Scientists will, for example, ask people to rate a number of objects as more or less similar to each other. Then they will write a computer program that tries to simulate the same answers that the humans gave. For instance, a person might say that "cat" and "dog" are similar words, so a good computer model should be able to take the word "dog" and respond with the word "cat" in a list of similar words. Computer models do this by applying some set of rules to a large collection of real world text (called a corpus).
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