Exploring Contextual Influences on Word Meaning via Multiple-Level Similarity Judgments
نویسنده
چکیده
It is well-known that many words’ meanings vary depending on the context in which they are used. This phenomenon has proven difficult to model, and recent work (Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008; Erk, McCarthy, & Gaylord, 2009; Brown, 2010) indicates that meaning-in-context varies in a manner much more subtle than would be represented by a dictionary, including reliable fine-grained intuitions about the similarity in meaning of two occurrences of a word in different contexts. This raises the question of how to predict these intuitions of semantic similarity on the basis of contextual information. I present the results of a Magnitude Estimation task in which participants judged the similarity in meaning between pairs of verb occurrences. Stimuli consisted of pairs of sentences containing a present tense intransitive motion verb and a singular definite NP subject (e.g. “The kid runs” vs. “The rabbit runs”). As the only varying component of sentential context, differences between the subject nouns in these pairs are hypothesized to predict intuitions about verbal semantic similarity. I explore four measures of noun similarity – two based on noun animacy, as well as conceptual and distributional similarity measures. I find that individually, all of these measures are significant predictors of verbal semantic similarity judgments, but that the best model of participant judgments combines all four. This is taken as an indication that a proper use of converging sources of evidence enables more accurate, detailed study of the perception of word meaning in context.
منابع مشابه
Testing the Distributional Hypothesis 1 Running head: TESTING THE DISTRIBUTIONAL HYPOTHESIS Testing the Distributional Hypothesis: The Influence of Context on Judgments of Semantic Similarity
Distributional information has recently been implicated as playing an important role in several aspects of language ability. Learning the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent, at least in part, on exposure to the word in its linguistic contexts of use. In two experiments, we manipulated subjects’ contextual experience with marginally familiar and nonce words. Results showed that similar...
متن کاملMeasuring Word Meaning in Context
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an old and important task in computational linguistics that still remains challenging, to machines as well as to human annotators. Recently there have been several proposals for representing word meaning in context that diverge from the traditional use of a single best sense for each occurrence. They represent word meaning in context through multiple paraphras...
متن کاملOn-line contextual influences during reading normal text: A multiple-regression analysis
On-line contextual influences during reading were examined in a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the degree of contextual constraints exerted on a given target word by the immediately prior word and by the prior sentence fragment. A decrease in inspection time was observed as contextual ...
متن کاملDissociation of lexical syntax and semantics: evidence from focal cortical degeneration.
The question of whether information relevant to meaning (semantics) and structure (syntax) relies on a common language processor or on separate subsystems has proved difficult to address definitively because of the confounds involved in comparing the two types of information. At the sentence level syntactic and semantic judgments make different cognitive demands, while at the single word level,...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011