Related papers: Verbal Perception and the Word Length Effect
A stochastic model of short-term verbal memory is proposed, in which the psychological state of the subject is encoded as the instantaneous position of a particle diffusing over a semantic graph with a probabilistic structure. The model is…
A topological argument is presented concering the structure of semantic space, based on the negative correlation between polysemy and word length. The resulting graph structure is applied to the modeling of free-recall experiments,…
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
We propose a model of the speech perception of individual words in the presence of mishearings. This phenomenological approach is based on concepts used in linguistics, and provides a formalism that is universal across languages. We put…
Cross-situational word learning, wherein a learner combines information about possible meanings of a word across multiple exposures, has previously been shown to be a very powerful strategy to acquire a large lexicon in a short time.…
Many tasks in Natural Language Processing involve recognizing lexical entailment. Two different approaches to this problem have been proposed recently that are quite different from each other. The first is an asymmetric similarity measure…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
Understanding human language has been a sub-challenge on the way of intelligent machines. The study of meaning in natural language processing (NLP) relies on the distributional hypothesis where language elements get meaning from the words…
This work develops a computational model (by Automata Networks) of phonological similarity effects involved in the formation of word-meaning associations on artificial populations of speakers. Classical studies show that in recalling…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
Semantic feature models have become a popular tool for prediction and interpretation of fMRI data. In particular, prior work has shown that differences in the fMRI patterns in sentence reading can be explained by context-dependent changes…
Multiple studies have probed representations emerging in neural networks trained for end-to-end NLP tasks and examined what word-level linguistic information may be encoded in the representations. In classical probing, a classifier is…
Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…
We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…