[Corpora-List] associative experiments, comparative linguistics

[chris brew]

Lev
the cognitive psychology literature on semantic networks includes


   - Collins, A.M., & Quillian, M.R. (1969). Retrieval Time from Semantic
   Memory. *Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior*, 8, 240-247.
   - Collins, A.M., & Loftus, E.F. (1975). A Spreading Activation Theory of
   Semantic Processing. *Psychological Review*, 82, 407-428.

These have MANY, MANY successors and predecessors, going through Jung back
to Wihelm Wundt.

- I don't work much in this area, but there is a well-known piece of
cautionary advice, which is that the types
of associations you get can depend in subtle ways on fine details of how you
do the experiment, and that
it is therefore difficult to draw solid conclusions about what the
experiments really mean. You should really
ask your Russian collaborators precisely what they are trying to show. Large
scale data collection is a
great idea, but be aware of the risk of collecting a large amount of
worthless data, and pilot anything
you do very carefully on a small scale before you dive into the large-scale
work.

If you can find an accessible version of


Schulte im Walde, S., *Melinger, A.*, Roth, M., & Weber, A. (2008). An
Empirical Characterisation of Response Types in German Association
Norms. *Research
on Language and Computation*, 6(2), 205-238.


I'm sure it will be a good start as a more modern thing. Or Steyvers,
Shiffrin and Nelson 2004, which is
online at http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/research.htm.

Two sentence summary: talk to the cognitive psychologists as well as the
computational linguists.They've
been all over this topic since the 19th century.


Chris



On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Lev Kundin <lev.kundin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>



-- 
CSE and Linguistics
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