[Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test
William Fletcher
fletcher at usna.edu
Thu Feb 16 19:09:31 UTC 2012
Ramesh, the subject of that study was Dutch, where there is usually less word class ambiguity than in English.
Exploring the networks at
http://www.kuleuven.be/semlab/interface/
I found almost no ambiguous associations (e.g. _eten_ verb 'to eat' / noun 'food', but in association with the cue word _vies_ 'dirty, disgusting' most likely the latter). Even with ambiguous cue words like _rollen_ verb 'to roll' / noun 'rolls, 'roles', or _boeken_ verb 'to book' / noun 'books' the top 10 associations were unambiguous with regard to word class.
Regards,
Bill Fletcher
---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:51:49 +0000
>From: corpora-bounces at uib.no (on behalf of "Krishnamurthy, Ramesh" <r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk>)
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test
>To: "corpora at uib.no" <corpora at uib.no>
>
> I just glanced through the 2 papers, and was
> surprised to find, in
>
> https://fac.ppw.kuleuven.be/lep/concat/simon/DeDeyneStorms2008_AssociationNetwork.pdf
>
> the statement that "For 327,833 responses (i.e., 86%
> of the association responses),
>
> the word class could be determined."
>
>
>
> I usually tell my students not to assume the
> wordclasses of items in word frequency lists, and to
> always check
>
> the concordances first. Is it really the case that
> in 86% of cases (or presumably an even greater
> percentage, given that
>
> many items in unlemmatized frequency lists will
> contain morphological/inflectional clues to
> wordclass),
>
> the students need not bother?
>
>
>
> best
>
> Ramesh Krishnamurthy
>
> Visiting Academic Fellow, School of Languages and
> Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET
>
> Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project):
> http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/
>
> Corpus Analyst:
>
> (a) GeWiss (Volkswagen Foundation) project:
> http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/
>
> (b) Discourse of Climate Change:
> http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/discourse-of-climate-change-project/
>
> (c) Feminism: http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/projects.html
>
> (d) COMENEGO (Corpus Multilingüe de EconomÃa y
> Negocios) - Multilingual Corpus of Business and
> Economics: http://dti.ua.es/comenego
>
> (e) European Phraseology Project:
> http://labidiomas3.ua.es/phraseology/login/login.php
>
>
>
> ------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:14:07 +0000
>
> From: Justin Washtell <lec3jrw at leeds.ac.uk>
>
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word
> association test
>
> To: Marc Brysbaert <marc.brysbaert at ugent.be>,
> "corpora at uib.no"
>
> <corpora at uib.no>
>
>
>
> Dear Marc & Gerrit,
>
>
>
> I guess I should have read the papers before posting
> :-) It's very good to know that these issues have
> been considered in depth.
>
>
>
> Are you aware of www.wordassociations.org? Although
> as far as I know this dataset has not been exploited
> academically, they appear to have gathered many
> millions of responses (using the single-response
> paradigm - although if you play with the interface
> you will see that it is vulnerable to what you call
> chaining in a slightly different guise).
>
>
>
> Justin Washtell
>
> University of Leeds
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
>
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no
> [corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Marc Brysbaert
> [marc.brysbaert at ugent.be]
>
> Sent: 15 February 2012 13:16
>
> To: corpora at uib.no
>
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word
> association test
>
>
>
> Thank you for these questions/replies. People
> interested in this topic may want to read the papers
> by De Deyne and Storms on similar studies in Dutch,
> in which the pros and the cons of the three
> associates are discussed and analyzed:
>
>
>
> https://fac.ppw.kuleuven.be/lep/concat/simon/DeDeyneStorms2008_AssociationNorms.pdf
>
> https://fac.ppw.kuleuven.be/lep/concat/simon/DeDeyneStorms2008_AssociationNetwork.pdf
>
>
>
> Kind regards, marc brysbaert
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Himanshu Sharma
> [mailto:himanshu.sharma.rocky at gmail.com]
>
> Sent: 15 February 2012 14:04
>
> To: Justin Washtell
>
> Cc: Marc Brysbaert; corpora at uib.no
>
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word
> association test
>
>
>
> I also thought of the same thing while responding in
> the experiment.
>
> Since the experiment is not a psychological one (I
> hope it's not),
>
> thus the effect that Mr.Washtell talks about is
> somewhat deteriorating
>
> the quality the word association data collected.
>
>
>
> But asking for a single response may limit the
> number of association
>
> that a word gets to the set of most common ones. For
> Ex. "Shirt" would
>
> probably be associated with "Buttons" , "collars" ,
> "clothes" etc. and
>
> not with something unusual like "Washing Powder". I
> don't know if
>
> responses such as "Washing Powder" play a role in
> word association
>
> study, but surely one can establish relations
> between any two words
>
> via long routes. Thus even after taking selection
> bias of 1st and 2nd
>
> response on the 3rd response into account, the
> responses do establish
>
> an association (may be a somewhat far fetched one).
>
> May be a weighted association and providing a
> sequence of response
>
> filling (1st field -> 2nd field -> 3rd field) (that
> Mr.Washtell talked
>
> about) would be a better approach .
>
>
>
> Regards ,
>
> Himanshu Sharma
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Justin Washtell
> <lec3jrw at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
>
> >
>
> > I found this incarnation of the word association
> experiment a little unnatural. **Perhaps it is best
> not to read on at this stage if you're planning on
> having a go at it, just in case I influence you!!**
>
> >
>
> > For each word the user is asked to provide three
> responses, one below the last, which arise
> "spontaneously" from the cue word. I think its fair
> to say that personally I never had three responses
> all come to mind simultaneously, such that I could
> hold them in my mind and then fill out the boxes.
> Rather, I'd have one arrive (which I might then fill
> in) and then I'd have to "allow" my mind to come up
> with another and so on.
>
> >
>
> > What I found however was that my latter responses
> tended to be influenced by my previous responses,
> and in some cases were only very tenuously
> associated with the original cue word, or not at all
> (e.g. awake -> alive -> kicking; idea -> thought ->
> provoke). I then found myself in the peculiar
> situation of consciously fighting this urge... and
> also of course wondering whether perhaps I shouldn't
> do such a thing. To be fair, the experimenters do
> provide the option of writing "no response", and I
> did this a few times when I was in doubt.
>
> >
>
> > I wonder then if the experimenters are accounting
> for this effect (I hope it is not just me!)
> Presumably the box to which a response belongs is
> being recorded, so if the second and third responses
> are indeed coloured by this sort of effect then it
> can be observed, and perhaps even factored out if it
> is not in keeping with the aims of the study. But
> what if users fill the boxes in some other arbitrary
> or even random order, as opposed to top-to-bottom
> like I did? More generally, I wonder whether the
> task of trying to be alert for three simultaneous
> responses may make this a more of a conscious task
> and colour the types of responses garnered.
>
> >
>
> > I'd be interested to hear others thoughts having
> attempted the task.
>
> >
>
> > On a related note, there is a similar experiment
> which has been running for some years now at
> www.wordassociation.org<http://www.wordassociation.org>.
> I did make a few attempts to tried to contact the
> creator, to try and obtain the (substantial) data
> for my PhD thesis, but had no luck. Does anybody
> know anything about this?
>
> >
>
> > Justin Washtell
>
> > University of Leeds
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > ________________________________
>
> > From: corpora-bounces at uib.no
> [corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Marc Brysbaert
> [marc.brysbaert at ugent.be]
>
> > Sent: 15 February 2012 10:07
>
> > To: corpora at uib.no
>
> > Subject: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word
> association test
>
> >
>
> > Dear all,
>
> >
>
> > Gert Storms and Simon De Deyne are running a
> worldwide word association test in English. Thus far
> they have over 1.25 million responses, but they
> require many more in order to have enough
> spontaneously produced associates to all known
> English words. The data will be made available to
> all researchers, just like the Florida norms, so
> that we can use them for our studies and include
> them in our computational models. Would it be
> possible to forward the call to your colleagues and
> students? The task itself only takes 5 minutes and
> involves giving associates to a few target words.
>
> >
>
> > Many thanks in advance, marc brysbaert
>
> >
>
> > From: Gerrit Storms
> [mailto:Gert.Storms at ppw.kuleuven.be]
>
> > Sent: 15 February 2012 10:55
>
> > To: Marc Brysbaert
>
> > Subject: word associations
>
> >
>
> > Dear Marc,
>
> >
>
> > Can I ask you a little favor?
>
> > Over the past few months, we have been trying to
> set up a scientific study that is important for many
> researchers interested in words, word meaning,
> semantics, and cognitive science in general. It is
> a huge word association project, in which people are
> asked to participate in a small task that doesn't
> last longer than 5 minutes. Our goal is to build a
> global word association network that contains
> connections between about 40.000 words, the size of
> the lexicon of an average adult. Setting up such a
> network might teach us a lot about semantic memory,
> how it develops, and maybe also about how it can
> deteriorate (like in Alzheimer's disease). Most
> people enjoy doing the task, but we need thousands
> of participants to succeed. Up till today, we found
> about 40,000 participants willing to do the little
> task, but we need more responses. That is why we
> address you. Would it be possible to forward this
> call for participation to graduate and undergraduate
> students who are fluent in English?
>
> >
>
> > The task can be found at
>
> >
>
> > http://www.smallworldofwords.com
>
> >
>
> > Of course the network will be freely available to
> all interested language researchers when it becomes
> substantial enough.
>
> >
>
> > We thank you in advance.
>
> >
>
> > If you want more information, don't hesitate to
> contact me.
>
> >
>
> > With kind regards,
>
> >
>
> > Prof. G. Storms and Dr. S. De Deyne
>
> > Department of Psychology
>
> > University of Leuven
>
> > Tiensestraat 102
>
> > 3000 Leuven
>
> > Belgium
>
> >
>
>
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