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On the Role of Contextual Information in the Organization of the Lexical Space

Authors:
Flavia De Simone
Roberta Presta
Simona Collina
Robert Hartsuiker

Keywords: Distributed Semantic Representation; Contextual Information; Self-Organizing Map; Semantic Map.

Abstract:
A hotly debated topic in Psycholinguistics concerns the mental representation of words. The current theories about mental lexicon agree on the idea that contextual information plays a crucial role in the organization of lexical knowledge in mind. This paper presents the results of a study we conducted onto two large scale corpora, an Italian one and a Dutch one, aiming at the evaluation of the power of words context in language learning and processing. To this aim, we leverage an outstanding computational model resembling the basic aspects of the internal language formation process. The experiment outcomes show that, starting from the contextual information, it is possible to gain knowledge of even language-specific characteristics. The results corroborate the language-independence of the model we used. We motivated the representativeness of the model also in the light of the current psychological theories.

Pages: 31 to 35

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: March 22, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4197

ISBN: 978-1-61208-390-2

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 22, 2015 to March 27, 2015