This is not an answer to your question, but I think you need to re-examine your assumption: word vector similarity does not mean conceptual association, but instead "do these two words occur in similar contexts?"
For example, I took top 500k words from GloVe 840B data (300 dim) from here, and tried to find 20 closest words to work
using cosine similarity:
1 work 1.000000
2 working 0.866403
3 works 0.834335
4 worked 0.764419
5 done 0.719101
6 well 0.688964
7 doing 0.668836
8 job 0.660955
9 needed 0.655303
10 but 0.639304
11 much 0.629863
12 way 0.626623
13 so 0.624697
14 really 0.623545
15 time 0.622452
16 how 0.622418
17 able 0.622250
18 better 0.616725
19 need 0.616229
20 good 0.613265
As you can see, it has little to do with the concept of work, but rather a collection of common words that may be appear together (e.g., "Does it really work better?")
A more interesting example might be democracy
:
1 democracy 1.000000
2 democratic 0.893857
3 democracies 0.754781
4 Democracy 0.714338
5 socialism 0.713453
6 capitalism 0.701732
7 political 0.695850
8 dictatorship 0.693884
9 politics 0.689959
10 freedom 0.685923
11 communism 0.682284
12 freedoms 0.679934
13 ideology 0.674064
14 tyranny 0.672013
15 liberalism 0.658101
16 socialist 0.650724
17 pluralism 0.648239
18 independence 0.645715
19 equality 0.641852
20 constitution 0.638677
We see dictatorship
, communism
, and tyranny
, because these words appear in the same context when democracy may be talked about. Further down, vote
is only #438 (0.433892), lower than authoritarianism
(#57), hegemony
(#87), or apartheid
(#213). But if you show these four words to people and ask "Which one is related to democracy?" then I feel most people will pick vote
.
In conclusion, you can't use word vector to answer "Do people associate 'work' with 'status'?" At best, you can ask "Do people use 'work' and 'status' together in sentences?", which is not the same thing. (Also, I have a feeling that a lot of these tweets could be something like "This app's status bar refuses to work, and their support line is a joke!" - These are very versatile words.)