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

合作研究：大规模语义启动数据库的构建和利用

• 批准号: 0524264
• 负责人: David Balota
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-07-15 至 2010-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0524264&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Construction; Utility; Large

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.

人类语言本质上是完全与语境相关的。通过考虑声音、单词、句子或段落的含义在脱离上下文或置于不同上下文中时如何发生巨大变化，可以清楚地看出这一事实。语言的语境性质已被证明是开发能够理解或生成语言的计算机算法的主要挑战，但人类在语境中处理语言是如此容易，以至于我们通常甚至没有意识到它。语言和认知科学家几十年来一直在研究人类如何处理上下文，通常是针对其他单词上下文中的单个单词。例如，众所周知，当“狗”这样的词出现在意义相关的“猫”这样的词之后不久，一个人识别“狗”这样的词的能力就会增强。像这样的结果被称为“语义启动”，我们对语义启动和其他类型的语境效应背后的机制的了解主要基于使用少量单词进行的研究，这些单词被选择来提出非常有针对性的理论观点。在国家科学基金会的支持下，博士。哈奇森和巴洛塔将采取互补的方法来研究语义启动机制。研究人员将开发一个包含 3000 多个英语单词的语义启动结果的大型数据库，而不是将其范围限制在少数单词上。该数据库将包括一系列有关单词及其用法的统计数据，并且这些数据将通过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，而且实际上可以利用语境来理解和产生语言。