Please don't do this. Too many assumptions about what and how I think leave a bad taste.
Yes, a model that can identify synonyms accurately lacks human faculties, including understanding. That's what modern machine learning boils down to. There are many tasks we thought would require human intelligence or reasoning, that can, after all, be reduced to dumb classification. In other words, there is no need to claim "understanding" to explain the output of a classification model, just because a human can perform the same task _and_ can understand it.
As to the representation- that is the only thing that matters. If you want to claim a model represents a concept, you have to be able to show where in the model's structure that concept is represented. If there is a representation- where is it?
