[Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test

Krishnamurthy, Ramesh r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk
Fri Feb 17 15:58:32 UTC 2012


Many thanks, Bill! 

Marc sent me an email pointing out that the paper was about Dutch...
so, as I said in my reply to him, I can only plead haste...
and insufficient knowledge of Dutch... :(

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 Economía 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


-----Original Message-----
From: William Fletcher [mailto:fletcher at usna.edu] 
Sent: 16 February 2012 19:10
To: corpora at uib.no; Krishnamurthy, Ramesh
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test

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 Economía 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
>
>   >
>
>
>________________
>_______________________________________________
>UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
>Corpora mailing list
>Corpora at uib.no
>http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora



_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora



More information about the Corpora mailing list