Collaborative Research: Construction and Utility of a Large Scale Semantic Priming Database

人类语言本质上完全是语境性的。这一事实可以通过考虑声音、单词、句子或段落的意思在脱离上下文或置于不同的上下文中时如何发生巨大变化来清楚地看出。语言的语境性质已被证明是开发能够理解或产生语言的计算机算法的主要挑战，然而人类在语境中处理语言是如此容易，以至于我们通常甚至都没有意识到这一点。几十年来，语言学和认知学家一直在研究人类如何处理语境，通常是针对其他词语上下文中的单个词语。例如，公认的是，当一个词出现在意义上相关的“猫”之后时，一个人识别像“狗”这样的词的能力就会增强。这样的结果被称为“语义启动”，我们对语义启动和其他类型语境效应背后的机制的了解主要是基于对少数几个词的研究，这些词是为了提出非常有针对性的理论观点而选择的。在国家科学基金会的支持下，Hutchison博士和Balota博士将采取互补的方法来研究语义启动的机制。研究人员将为3000多个英语单词开发一个语义启动结果的大型数据库，而不是将其范围限制在少数几个单词上。该数据库将包括有关这些词及其用法的一系列统计数据，这些数据将通过一个强大的网络界面提供给研究界。该数据库将帮助世界各地的研究人员推进这一过程的理论和计算模型，使人类不仅能够克服语境的挑战，而且实际上在理解和产生语言时利用语境是他们的优势。

Human languages are thoroughly contextual in nature. This fact can be seen plainly by considering how the meaning of a sound, word, sentence, or passage can change drastically when taken out of context, or placed in a different context. The contextual nature of language has proven to be a major challenge for developing computer algorithms that can understand or produce language, yet humans process language in context so easily that we are usually not even aware of it. Linguistic and cognitive scientists have been studying how humans process context for decades, often with respect to individual words in the context of other words. For instance, it is well established that a person's ability to recognize a word like "dog" is enhanced when it appears shortly after a word like "cat" that is related in meaning. Results like these are referred to as "semantic priming", and our knowledge of the mechanisms that underlie semantic priming and other kinds of contextual effects is mostly based on research using small handfuls of words chosen to make very targeted theoretical points. With support of the National Science Foundation, Drs. Hutchison and Balota will take a complementary approach to studying the mechanisms of semantic priming. Rather than restricting their scope to small handfuls of words, the investigators will develop a large database of semantic priming results for over 3,000 words of English. The database will include a range of statistics about the words and their usages, and the data will be made available to the research community via a powerful web interface. The database will help researchers throughout the world to advance theories and computational models of the processes that allow humans to not only overcome the challenge of context, but actually use context to their advantage in the comprehension and production of language.