Learning about the Meanings of Ambiguous Words: Evidence from a Word-Meaning Priming Paradigm with Short Narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires readers and listeners to rapidly select an appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. This meaning selection process is particularly challenging when low-frequency (subordinate) word meanings are used (e.g. the “river bank” meaning of “bank”). Recent word-meaning priming experiments show that recent experience can help to make subordinate word meanings more readily available, and thereby reduce the difficulty in accessing these meanings. One limitation of previous word-meaning priming experiments is that participants encounter the ambiguous words within a list of unconnected single sentences in which each ambiguous word is strongly disambiguated by words within the prime sentence. The current web-based study (N=51) extends this work to replicate word-meaning priming using short 3-sentence narratives as primes in which relatively weak contextual cues in sentence 1 serve to disambiguate a target ambiguous word that occurs in sentence 3. The results from the subsequent word-association test task confirmed that following a short delay (digit span) task the primed (subordinate) meanings were more readily available compared with an unprimed control. This work represents an important first step in moving the word-meaning priming paradigm towards materials that more reflect the varied ways in which ambiguous words are used within natural language.

„Zagęszczenia wieloznaczeń” – gry językowe w poezji Urszuli Kozioł

The article presents the linguistic mechanisms used by the poet Urszula Kozioł to play poetic linguistic games with her readers. Based on selected poems, the article discusses the ways of employing means from various levels of the language system, including the phonetic, morphological, inflection, syntactic and semantic systems. It is pointed out that U. Kozioł’s linguistic games are often based on complex etymological and word-building mechanisms. As a result of these, the poetry is full of unexpected, often ambiguous word forms that surprise the readers with their unconstricted morphological and phonetic form with frequently unspecified and unclear meaning, making room for new, often non-standard interpretations.

The Time-Course of Induced Interpretive Biases in Healthy Individuals Varying in Depressive Symptoms

<p>Cognitive theories of depression posit that after a negative event or mood state, those vulnerable to the disorder automatically impose negative interpretations on ambiguous information. However, empirical research on depression-linked interpretive biases has yielded mixed results, likely due to flawed experimental paradigms and statistical techniques that do not adequately control for anxiety. Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I) is an innovative research paradigm that involves inducing interpretive biases in an experimentally controlled manner. The current study is the first to assess whether cognitive bias modification influences interpretation differently according to vulnerability to depression. Individuals scoring lower and higher on a depression inventory judged the relatedness of either neutrally valenced (e.g. book-read) or negatively valenced (e.g. sick-vomit) word-pairs. They then made judgements about homophone word-pairs, in which the first word could be interpreted as either neutral in meaning (e.g. dye-ink) or negative in meaning (e.g. die-death). At the later stages of processing all individuals, regardless of depression scores, resolved ambiguous word-pairs in a training-congruent manner, consistent with previous CBM-I studies. However, in the early stages of processing, those scoring higher, but not lower in the depression inventory, were uniquely receptive to negative context training, such that they were more likely to interpret ambiguous word-pairs in a negative as opposed to neutral manner. This finding is crucially important, as it helps to clarify theoretical debate in the literature.</p>

The Time-Course of Induced Interpretive Biases in Healthy Individuals Varying in Depressive Symptoms

<p>Cognitive theories of depression posit that after a negative event or mood state, those vulnerable to the disorder automatically impose negative interpretations on ambiguous information. However, empirical research on depression-linked interpretive biases has yielded mixed results, likely due to flawed experimental paradigms and statistical techniques that do not adequately control for anxiety. Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I) is an innovative research paradigm that involves inducing interpretive biases in an experimentally controlled manner. The current study is the first to assess whether cognitive bias modification influences interpretation differently according to vulnerability to depression. Individuals scoring lower and higher on a depression inventory judged the relatedness of either neutrally valenced (e.g. book-read) or negatively valenced (e.g. sick-vomit) word-pairs. They then made judgements about homophone word-pairs, in which the first word could be interpreted as either neutral in meaning (e.g. dye-ink) or negative in meaning (e.g. die-death). At the later stages of processing all individuals, regardless of depression scores, resolved ambiguous word-pairs in a training-congruent manner, consistent with previous CBM-I studies. However, in the early stages of processing, those scoring higher, but not lower in the depression inventory, were uniquely receptive to negative context training, such that they were more likely to interpret ambiguous word-pairs in a negative as opposed to neutral manner. This finding is crucially important, as it helps to clarify theoretical debate in the literature.</p>

Ambiguous Word Processing among Second Language Learners

This study investigated second language learners’ processing of ambiguous words (e.g., bank: [1] a financial institution, [2] an edge of a river/lake) and whether these learners are able to activate the secondary meaning as quickly as they do with the dominant meaning. English L2 and L1 participants used a window paradigm to perform a self-paced reading task, in which all sentences were biased for the secondary meaning (i.e., bank as an edge of a river/lake). The results showed that L1 participants activated both the dominant and the secondary meanings of an ambiguous word even when it is embedded within a secondary-biasing context. However, L2 participants had some difficulty in activating the L2 secondary meaning even when the preceding context was biased for it. The results of the L1 participants were compatible with the autonomous access model in that all meanings of an ambiguous [L1] word are accessed even when the context is biasing for a specific meaning. However, the results of the L2 participants, although they knew both meanings of each ambiguous word in this study based on their post-experiment questionnaire, showed that the more dominant meaning of an L2 ambiguous word is activated first, even when the context is biasing for a secondary meaning.

Graph Convolutional Network for Word Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an important research topic in natural language processing, which is widely applied to text classification, machine translation, and information retrieval. In order to improve disambiguation accuracy, this paper proposes a WSD method based on the graph convolutional network (GCN). Word, part of speech, and semantic category are extracted from contexts of the ambiguous word as discriminative features. Discriminative features and sentence containing the ambiguous word are used as nodes to construct the WSD graph. Word2Vec tool, Doc2Vec tool, pointwise mutual information (PMI), and TF-IDF are applied to compute embeddings of nodes and edge weights. GCN is used to fuse features of a node and its neighbors, and the softmax function is applied to determine the semantic category of the ambiguous word. Training corpus of SemEval-2007: Task #5 is adopted to optimize the proposed WSD classifier. Test corpus of SemEval-2007: Task #5 is used to test the performance of WSD classifier. Experimental results show that average accuracy of the proposed method is improved.

A Dostoevskian Dialogue Structure for the Presentation of the Unconscious

In this article, I demonstrate that in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872), Dostoevsky uses a specific type of dialogue—which I term “the about-face dialogue”—to present the displacement of a young man’s unconscious rage against his mother on to society while hiding it from the awareness of both protagonist and reader. In this type of dialogue, the protagonist interprets his interlocutor’s unwittingly ambiguous word or phrase as a scathing rebuke of his rage against his mother, and his reaction constitutes a displacement of this rage on to the outside world. Our awareness of the interplay between the unconscious and the outside world in this type of dialogue enables us to understand the protagonist’s sudden about-face from compassion to apathy, or even animosity, which is incomprehensible on the purely rational level.

A REVIEW ON WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION EMPHASIZING THE DATA RESOURCES ON WORDNET AND CORPUS

Word Sense Disambiguation is a disambiguating technique of finding the most relevant sense of an ambiguous word with the aid of its surrounding words. In this paper, we pointed out the various Word Sense Disambiguation approaches along with its different techniques, state of the art, comparative studies of the existing system highlighting its benefits and limitations across all the widely well known Indian and foreign languages. In this paper, we converse our study by emphasizing to all the studies that uses WordNet, IndoWordNet or corpus as the main data resources of the referred languages.