Реферат: Cognitive aspects of lexicon in the light of the language picture of the world

Looking at the 3-way solution in more detail, in Italian, the concept horse is in the same cluster with objects and body parts (as opposed to German, where the solution is perfect). The misclassification results mainly from the fact that for horse a lot of functional properties were obtained (which is a feature of objects), but none of them for the other animals in the Italian data.

In German, some functional properties were assigned to both horse and dog, which might explain why it was not misclassified there.

To conclude, the type profiles associated with animals, vegetables and objects/body parts have enough internal coherence that they robustly identify these macro-classes in both languages. Interestingly, a 3-way distinction of this sort – excluding body parts – is seen as fundamental on the basis of neuro-cognitive data by Caramazza and Shelton (1998). On the other hand, we did not find evidence that more granular distinctions could be made based on the few (6) and very general types we used. We plan to explore the distribution across the remaining types in the future (preliminary clustering experiments show that much more nuanced discriminations, even among all 10 categories, can be made if we use all types). However, for our applied purposes, it is sensible to focus on relatively coarse but well-defined classes, and on just a few common relation types (alternatively, we plan to combine types into superordinate ones, e. g. external and internal quality). This should simplify both the automatic harvesting of corpus-based properties of the target types and the structuring of the dictionary relational interface.

Finally, the peculiar object-like behaviour of body parts on the one hand, and the special nature of horse, on the other, should remind us of how concept classification is not a trivial task, once we try to go beyond the most obvious categories typically studied by cognitive scientists – animals, plants, manipulable tools. In a lexicographic perspective, this problem cannot be avoided, and, indeed, the proposed approach should scale in difficulties to even trickier domains, such as those of actions or emotions.

Conclusion

This research is part of a project that aims to investigate the cognitive salience of semantic relations for (pedagogical) lexicographic purposes. The resulting most salient relations are to be used for revising and adding to the word field entries of a multilingual electronic dictionary in a language learning environment.

We presented a multi-lingual concept description experiment. Participants produced different semantic relation type patterns across concept classes. Moreover, these patterns were robust across the two native languages studied in the experiment – even though a closer look at the data suggested that linguistic constraints might affect (verbalisations of) conceptual representations (and thus, to a certain extent, which properties are produced). This is a promising result to be used for automatically harvesting semantically related words for a given lexical entry of a concept class.

However, the granularity of concept classes has to be defined. In addition, to yield a larger number of usable data for the analysis, a re-mapping of the rare semantic relation types occurring in the actual data set should be conducted. Moreover, the stimuli set will have to be expanded to include, e. g., abstract concepts – although we hope to mine some abstract concept classes on the basis of the properties of our concept set (colors, for example, could be characterized by the concrete objects of which they are typical).

To complement the production experiment results, we aim to conduct an experiment which investigates the perceptual salience of the produced semantic relations (and possibly additional ones), in order to detect inconsistencies between generation and retrieval of salient properties. If, as we hope, we will find that essentially the same properties are salient for each class across languages and both in production and perception, we will then have a pretty strong argument to suggest that these are the relations one should focus on when populating multi-lingual dictionaries.

Of course, the ultimate test of our approach will come from empirical evidence of the usefulness of our relation links to the language learner. This is, however, beyond the scope of the current project.