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Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences
This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to catego...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6310260/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30592738 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209449 |
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author | Cassani, Giovanni Grimm, Robert Daelemans, Walter Gillis, Steven |
author_facet | Cassani, Giovanni Grimm, Robert Daelemans, Walter Gillis, Steven |
author_sort | Cassani, Giovanni |
collection | PubMed |
description | This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to categorize words into lexical categories. The categorization outcome was regressed over three main distributional predictors computed for each word, including frequency, contextual diversity, and average conditional probability given all the co-occurring contexts. Results show that both contextual diversity and frequency have a positive effect while the average conditional probability has a negative effect. This indicates that words are easier to categorize in the face of uncertainty: categorization works best for words which are frequent, diverse, and hard to predict given the co-occurring contexts. This shows how, in order for the learner to see an opportunity to form a category, there needs to be a certain degree of uncertainty in the co-occurrence pattern. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6310260 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-63102602019-01-08 Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences Cassani, Giovanni Grimm, Robert Daelemans, Walter Gillis, Steven PLoS One Research Article This paper analyzes distributional properties that facilitate the categorization of words into lexical categories. First, word-context co-occurrence counts were collected using corpora of transcribed English child-directed speech. Then, an unsupervised k-nearest neighbor algorithm was used to categorize words into lexical categories. The categorization outcome was regressed over three main distributional predictors computed for each word, including frequency, contextual diversity, and average conditional probability given all the co-occurring contexts. Results show that both contextual diversity and frequency have a positive effect while the average conditional probability has a negative effect. This indicates that words are easier to categorize in the face of uncertainty: categorization works best for words which are frequent, diverse, and hard to predict given the co-occurring contexts. This shows how, in order for the learner to see an opportunity to form a category, there needs to be a certain degree of uncertainty in the co-occurrence pattern. Public Library of Science 2018-12-28 /pmc/articles/PMC6310260/ /pubmed/30592738 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209449 Text en © 2018 Cassani et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Cassani, Giovanni Grimm, Robert Daelemans, Walter Gillis, Steven Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title | Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title_full | Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title_fullStr | Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title_full_unstemmed | Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title_short | Lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
title_sort | lexical category acquisition is facilitated by uncertainty in distributional co-occurrences |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6310260/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30592738 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209449 |
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