Thursday 21 June 2012

The World Within Wikipedia: An Ecology of Mind

an article by Andrew M. Olney (University of Memphis), Rick Dale (University of California, Merced) and Sidney K. D’Mello (University of Notre Dame) published in Information Volume 3 Number 2 (2012)

Abstract

Human beings inherit an informational culture transmitted through spoken and written language. A growing body of empirical work supports the mutual influence between language and categorization, suggesting that our cognitive-linguistic environment both reflects and shapes our understanding.

By implication, artefacts that manifest this cognitive-linguistic environment, such as Wikipedia, should represent language structure and conceptual categorization in a way consistent with human behaviour.

We use this intuition to guide the construction of a computational cognitive model, situated in Wikipedia, that generates semantic association judgements. Our unsupervised model combines information at the language structure and conceptual categorization levels to achieve state of the art correlation with human ratings on semantic association tasks including WordSimilarity-353, semantic feature production norms, word association, and false memory.

Full text (PDF 27pp)


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