scholarly journals Sensorimotor distance: A fully grounded measure of semantic similarity for 800 million concept pairs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cai Wingfield ◽  
Louise Connell
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Concept Pairs ◽  
Similarity Judgements

Experimental design and computational modelling across the cognitive sciences often rely on measures of semantic similarity between concepts. Traditional measures of semantic similarity are typically derived from distance in taxonomic databases (e.g. WordNet), databases of participant-produced semantic features, or corpus-derived linguistic distributional similarity (e.g. LSA), all of which are theoretically problematic in their lack of grounding in sensorimotor experience. We present a new measure of sensorimotor distance between concepts, based on multidimensional comparisons of their experiential strength across 11 perceptual and action-effector dimensions in the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms. We demonstrate that, in modelling human similarity judgements, sensorimotor distance has comparable explanatory power to other measures of semantic similarity, explains variance in human judgements which is missed by other measures, and does so with the advantages of remaining both fully grounded and computationally efficient. Moreover, sensorimotor distance is equally effective for both concrete and abstract concepts. We further introduce a web-based tool (https://lancaster.ac.uk/psychology/smdistance) for easily calculating and visualising sensorimotor distance between words, featuring coverage of nearly 800 million word-pairs. Supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/d42q6/.

Making it abstract, making it contestable: Gender/sex as a politicized concept

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Matteo Santarelli
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Biological Feature ◽  
Dynamic Approach ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Science Framework ◽  
The One

The concept of gender has been the battleground of scientific and political speculations for a long time. On the one hand, some accounts contended that gender is a biological feature, while on the other hand some scholars maintained that gender is a socio-cultural construct (e.g., Butler, 1990; Risman, 2004). Some of the questions that animated the debate on gender over history are: how many genders are there? Is gender rooted in our biological asset? Are gender and sex the same thing? All of these questions entwine one more crucial, and often overlooked interrogative. How is it possible for a concept to be the purview of so many disagreements and conceptual redefinitions? The question that this paper addresses is therefore not which specific account of gender is preferable. Rather, the main question we will address is how and why is even possible to disagree on how gender should be considered. To provide partial answers to these questions, we suggest that gender/sex (van Anders, 2015; Fausto-Sterling, 2019) is an illustrative example of politicized concepts. We show that no concepts are political in themselves; instead, some concepts are subjected to a process involving a progressive detachment from their supposed concrete referent (i.e., abstractness), a tension to generalizability (i.e., abstraction), a partial indeterminacy (i.e., vagueness), and the possibility of being contested (i.e., contestability). All of these features differentially contribute to what we call the politicization of a concept. In short, we will claim that in order to politicize a concept, a possible strategy is to evidence its more abstract facets, without denying its more embodied and perceptual components (Borghi et al., 2019). So, we will first outline how gender has been treated in psychological and philosophical discussions, to evidence its essentially contestable character thereby showing how it became a politicized concept. Then we will review some of the most influential accounts of political concepts, arguing that currently they need to be integrated with more sophisticated distinctions (e.g., Koselleck, 2004). The notions gained from the analyses of some of the most important accounts of political concepts in social sciences and philosophy will allow us to implement a more dynamic approach to political concepts. Specifically, when translated into the cognitive science framework, these reflections will help us clarifying some crucial aspects of the nature of politicized concepts. Bridging together social and cognitive sciences, we will show how politicized concepts are abstract concepts, or better abstract conceptualizations.

scholarly journals How well do similarity measures predict priming in abstract and concrete concepts?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Montefinese ◽  
Erin Michelle Buchanan ◽  
David Vinson
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Similarity Measures ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Association Strength ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Strategic Processes ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Concrete Concepts

Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models). Although, these three factors are correlated in characterizing semantic representation, they seem to tap different aspects of meaning. We designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, we observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes. These results provide important insight about the nature of priming and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation.

Bridging the gap between respiratory research and health literacy: an interactive web-based platform

2020 ◽  
pp. bmjstel-2020-000678
Author(s):  
Kelly Burrowes ◽  
Haribalan Kumar ◽  
Alys Clark ◽  
Taco de Wolff ◽  
Merryn Tawhai
Keyword(s):  
Health Literacy ◽  
Respiratory Disease ◽  
Computer Modelling ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Respiratory Physiology ◽  
Smoking History ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Lung Structure ◽  
And Function

Many patients with respiratory disease lack an understanding of basic respiratory physiology and the changes occurring in their lungs due to disease. Describing how the lungs work using realistic 3D visualisation of lung structure and function will improve communication of complicated concepts, resulting in improved health literacy. We developed a web-based platform, using anatomically realistic 3D lung models, to create an interactive visualisation tool to improve health literacy for patients with respiratory disease. A small amount of non-identifying personal information including gender, age, weight, height and smoking history can be used to customise the visualisation to an individual user. 3D computer modelling was used to create a web-based application that helps people understand how their lungs work in health and disease. The web-based application includes pages describing and visualising how the lungs work and the changes that occur during asthma and damage that smoking may be doing to their lungs. The application is freely available and located at https://sites.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz/silo6/lung_new/. This application bridges the gap between computational modelling and patient education, giving a visually compelling view into the patient’s body that cannot be provided with any existing tools, hence providing a novel platform for enhancing patient–clinician interaction.

Epilogue: Missing Information?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Missing Information ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Positioning Systems ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content

The epilogue takes a last look at the possibility that REC may be leaving out something explanatorily important because it says nothing about how the brain processes informational content. Focusing on a prominent case, it is demonstrated that REC has the resources to understand the groundbreaking research on positioning systems in rat brains. It is argued that rat brains can be informationally sensitive without processing informational content. No explanatory power is lost in adopting REC’s deflated explanation; but much is gained by doing so since it avoids the Hard Problem of Content. The chapter concludes by showing how REC’s proposed vision of neurodynamics is wholly compatible with its dynamical and extensive account of cognition; a vision of cognition that opens the door to broader lines of research in the cognitive sciences that taking into account the ways in which culture can permeate cognition.

Experimentally Induced Single and Repeated Personal Name Confusions: The Impact of Phonological and Semantic Similarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 781-805
Author(s):  
Manuel Dupont
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Phonological Similarity ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
Semantic Code ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
First Results ◽  
Phonological Similarities ◽  
The Impact

Three experiments investigated a common but intriguing phenomenon, that is, repeated personal name confusion, a phenomenon at the border between language and memory. The purpose of those experiments was to evaluate the impact of the semantic and phonological similarities on name confusion and to compare repeated naming confusions (i.e., repeatedly confounding two names) with single confusions (i.e., confounding two names only once) in a same experimental paradigm. In all experiments, participants (64 middle-aged participants for each experiment) were asked to memorize the association between 16 names and 16 faces (face-name learning task). In Experiments 1 and 2, the two studied variables were the phonological similarity between the confused names and the semantic similarity between the two bearers of the confused names (using a visually derived semantic code in Experiment 1 and an identity-specific semantic code in Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the impact of those two semantic similarities between the bearers of the confused names was taken into account, whereas the phonological similarity was not taken into account. First, results showed a main effect of the phonological and semantic similarity on name confusion (more confusions when the names were phonologically related or when the bearers of the names were semantically related). Second, we found that (1) the combination of the phonological and the semantic similarity and (2) the combination of the two semantic similarities led to an increase of name confusions. Third, in the three experiments, we found that the semantic and phonological similarities had a similar impact on repeated and single confusions. Finally, results showed that participants always made more single than repeated confusions, except in the case when the bearers of the confused names shared two semantic features.

Emotion Mining Using Semantic Similarity

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafiya Jan ◽  
Afaq Alam Khan
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Semantic Relatedness ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Emotion Detection ◽  
Emotion Classification ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Distributional Semantic Models ◽  
Affective Information

Social networks are considered as the most abundant sources of affective information for sentiment and emotion classification. Emotion classification is the challenging task of classifying emotions into different types. Emotions being universal, the automatic exploration of emotion is considered as a difficult task to perform. A lot of the research is being conducted in the field of automatic emotion detection in textual data streams. However, very little attention is paid towards capturing semantic features of the text. In this article, the authors present the technique of semantic relatedness for automatic classification of emotion in the text using distributional semantic models. This approach uses semantic similarity for measuring the coherence between the two emotionally related entities. Before classification, data is pre-processed to remove the irrelevant fields and inconsistencies and to improve the performance. The proposed approach achieved the accuracy of 71.795%, which is competitive considering as no training or annotation of data is done.

scholarly journals PERSONIFICATION IN THE EMOTIVE PROSE TEXT (IN THE NOVEL "LES VENTS NOIRS" ("THE BLACK WINDS") BY ARNAUD DE LA GRANGE)

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
ALEXEY V. FEDORINOV ◽  
◽  
VALENTINA F. REMIZOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Time Of Day ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Related Substances ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Physical Abilities

The paper examines the denotata of personification in the novel "Les vents noirs" ("The Black Winds") by Arnaud de La Grange. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the material under study has resulted in the identification of the main groups of personifications in the emotive prose text: personification of objects, personification of abstract concepts, personification of physical (natural) phenomena. Within each group, subgroups have been identified based on semantic features. The group of physical (natural) phenomena includes denotata of meteorological phenomena, time of day, celestial bodies and the light they radiate. The group of abstract concepts covers a wide variety of denotata related to mental states, mental and physical abilities, moral experiences, military and political terms and the philosophical category of time. It has been figured out that the most frequent examples are personification of objects that include geographical objects, natural objects and related substances, human body parts, and objects related to the war. Those objects and phenomena that play a key role in the development of the novel have been personified. Personification as a part of the lexical system of the novel, serves as the most important means of constructing this emotive prose text.

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