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Grounding Abstract Word Definitions In Prior Concrete Experience

Grounding Abstract Word Definitions In Prior Concrete Experience
Grounding Abstract Word Definitions In Prior Concrete Experience
Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) have a defining vocabulary of 2000 words from which most but not all of the words are defined. We developed an algorithm, applicable to any dictionary, for recursively deleting words not used in any definition until the corpus is reduced to a subset – a grounding kernel – from which all the words of the complete dictionary are reachable by definition alone. We compared LDOCE’s and CIDE’s defining vocabulary (DV) and grounding kernel (GK) against the rest of its words, on (1) concreteness, (2) imagery and (3) age of acquisition based on the MRC psycholinguistic database [Wilson 1988]. Both GK and DV proved significantly higher on all three scales (p<0.001) for all but 2 of the 12 comparisons (no difference in concreteness in LDOCE for either GK or DV). The difference was also consistently greater using our automatically computed GK than using the DV defined by the compilers of LDOCE and CIDE.
mental lexicon, symbol grounding, language acquisition, sensorimotor category learning
Chicoisne, Guillaume
860ea92c-e23e-4aae-bab2-72d8c06eef11
Blondin-Masse, Alexandre
e20957bb-9a78-4d32-b205-0e5254642a39
Picard, Olivier
886e0932-a271-46bf-9a6a-8d9df7b4abd9
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Chicoisne, Guillaume
860ea92c-e23e-4aae-bab2-72d8c06eef11
Blondin-Masse, Alexandre
e20957bb-9a78-4d32-b205-0e5254642a39
Picard, Olivier
886e0932-a271-46bf-9a6a-8d9df7b4abd9
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Chicoisne, Guillaume, Blondin-Masse, Alexandre, Picard, Olivier and Harnad, Stevan (2008) Grounding Abstract Word Definitions In Prior Concrete Experience. Sixth Annual Conference on the Mental Lexicon, , Banff, Canada. 07 - 10 Oct 2008. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) have a defining vocabulary of 2000 words from which most but not all of the words are defined. We developed an algorithm, applicable to any dictionary, for recursively deleting words not used in any definition until the corpus is reduced to a subset – a grounding kernel – from which all the words of the complete dictionary are reachable by definition alone. We compared LDOCE’s and CIDE’s defining vocabulary (DV) and grounding kernel (GK) against the rest of its words, on (1) concreteness, (2) imagery and (3) age of acquisition based on the MRC psycholinguistic database [Wilson 1988]. Both GK and DV proved significantly higher on all three scales (p<0.001) for all but 2 of the 12 comparisons (no difference in concreteness in LDOCE for either GK or DV). The difference was also consistently greater using our automatically computed GK than using the DV defined by the compilers of LDOCE and CIDE.

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More information

Submitted date: 8 October 2008
Additional Information: Event Dates: University of Alberta, Banff Alberta
Venue - Dates: Sixth Annual Conference on the Mental Lexicon, , Banff, Canada, 2008-10-07 - 2008-10-10
Keywords: mental lexicon, symbol grounding, language acquisition, sensorimotor category learning
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 266618
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/266618
PURE UUID: 5e97ec31-866f-4adc-821a-2455b97ac8ff
ORCID for Stevan Harnad: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 02 Sep 2008 19:13
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:48

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Contributors

Author: Guillaume Chicoisne
Author: Alexandre Blondin-Masse
Author: Olivier Picard
Author: Stevan Harnad ORCID iD

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