A thought I had the other day was how much of a driver was our need for rhythm and rhyme in the development of synonyms. Which led me to thinking how much is language driven by fun, as much as it is by any real logic. It seems word choice for any given topic is dominated by early mover and then just plain pleasant sound.

To that end, any system that is just looking for the logic of an underlying system is going to be stymied by the fundamental lack of it in language. There is the appearance of logic. And it can actually get you quite far. However, I question if it can encompass all of it. At least until the next best seller comes out.

To that end, I do not find it surprising that the best model will be an ensemble model. More, as long as we are dealing with English (a non-pictographic and a non-phonetic language), then we are ultimately trying to build a model on top of a malleable base where appeals to the logic of yesterday in a language have a non zero chance of failing today. (Edit to make this point clearer, it is amusing to me how many lines in classic Shakespear no longer pop in the same way for current language. "Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough". That a pair of words could cease to be homophones is not something that seems at all obvious. Of course, I have not studied this in decades, so mayhap my grade school lied to me.)