[Corpora-List] associative experiments, comparative linguistics

[Lev Kundin]

Dear corpora list members,

Thank you very much for all replies - I will be having a look at all
the resources that you have kindly referenced very shortly and maybe
will be getting back to you with some further questions. I appreciate
your commitment - it's always very nice to get back to corpora list
and find everyone being so helpful, and replying very promptly.

However, having scanned your responses and read my message again, I
realised that I did not express myself clearly. By associative
experiments and word associations I meant those experiments when a
respondent is given a number of words in one language (or several? -
but that's something I haven't heard of so far, hence asking) and they
are supposed to put down their first association with each of the
words. Those pairs (stimulus-reaction) are then being analysed),
semantic networks bearing the strength of each association are
constructed and drawn conclusions upon etc. That's my vague
understanding of the field, I am only embarking on (or rather planning
to do) research in this field and would like to find references on
current/previous achievements in the area. I hope this clarifies what
I am looking for and maybe you can give me more specific hints. I am
sorry if some of you already did get me right and pointed out some
highly relevant materials - I haven't had a chance to have a look
through the references, but will definitely do so shortly.

I would also like to give some background, because both of my
enquiries sound a bit 'out of the blue'. I am a computer scientist,
did my BA in Moscow, then went to Oxford for an MSc in Computer
Science last year where I took several CL-related courses (this is my
professional hobby, so to say) and did a final project under
supervision of Steve Clark (Oxford Comlab) and Pete Whitelock (OUP)
called 'Bilingual Corpus Exploratory Workbench'. The project was about
trying to analyse the nature of bilingual equivalence and creating a
tool for lexicographers to assist them in putting together bilingual
dictionaries by suggesting different translations for stem words
entered. I then wanted to do a DPhil in Oxford, but didn't find any
funding, so had to get back to work (now in UK). I am still thinking
back to Computational Linguistics though, because that's one of the
few areas in my profession that really amuses me.

Having got in touch with a researcher back in Russia recently, I am
now planning to do a part-time research work under his supervision in
the field that I attempted to describe above. Their lab has previously
done such experiments in Russian and several other languages I
believe. My idea and potential topic is to firstly try and create an
internet-based multilingual version of such experiment to bring it to
a much larger scale and collect some more or less significant volumes
of data. Secondly, I am supposed to come up with new methods/forms of
such experiments, and, more importantly, new ways of analysing their
results. That's it in a nutshell.

Once again, I would appreciate any advice on all above. Sorry it was a
lengthy email, but I wanted to try and get it as clear as I could at
this point. If anyone who is reading this feels they might be
interested in any sort of collaboration regarding my future research,
I would definitely be keen on discussing that.

Thanks again to everyone.

Regards,
Lev.

2009/8/17 Lev Kundin <lev.kundin at gmail.com>:
> Dear all,
>
> I would appreciate if someone could point me into the direction of
> some research/experiments(off/on-line)/articles/any other materials in
> the area of gathering word associations, various methods of analysing
> them and/or comparative analysis of word associations among different
> languages. Any help will be highly appreciated, including corrections
> on the terminology of this research area that I have hopefully vaguely
> identified.
>
> Thank you very much in advance.
>
> Best regards,
> Lev.
>

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