IBSS: New Methods for Investigating the Formation of Individual and Shared Concepts and Their Dynamic Dispersion Across Related Societies

IBSS：研究个体和共享概念的形成及其在相关社会中的动态分散的新方法

• 批准号: 1416907
• 负责人: Kimberly Jameson
• 金额: $ 98.09万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1416907&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IBSS; New; Methods; Investigating; Formation

This interdisciplinary research project will develop and test new mathematical models that explore the ways through which conceptual meaning is represented in languages as those languages change in complexity over time. The project investigators also will examine the ways such meaning is shared among groups of individuals in societies. The project's models will describe the dynamic development of concepts as a geometric system and will provide methods for understanding the linguistic representation of concepts and the ways semantic meaning from one community can be influenced by that of neighboring communities. Although this project will focus on the ways that color terms have evolved within languages and societies, the insights and information from this project will apply beyond the domain of color representation to any set of concepts in which objects have a similarity structure that can be assessed and described mathematically. Examples of the kinds of situations where the approach and methods to be developed during this project will have utility are the following: (1) the development of unambiguous and formally scalable artificial intelligence and robotic analogs of human classification and categorization systems; (2) the development of a global communication methodology that could be used to enhance rapid global information messaging capabilities; and (3) the construction of standardized systems for information representation in critical systems, such as medical diagnostic systems and transportation systems. The formation and communication of concepts permeate a diverse range of human activities. They play roles in education systems; in the organization and design of transportation systems; in the physical and virtual design of retail markets and consumer goods; in classifications of quality and risk in medical diagnoses; in business performance; and in social values. Psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, computer scientists, and other scholars have studied concepts by focusing on specific examples of concept formation while trying to understand how such conceptual systems are formed. One specific concept that has received attention is how color terms "evolve" and how their conceptual meaning is understood and shared by members of a society. Conceptualization of color is an important special case because color stimuli can be precisely measured and easily duplicated, and the human perceptual space of a million colors can be described with mathematical precision. This project will focus on the development and testing of mathematical models that capture the ways color term concepts are categorized and shared. The models to be designed and tested will use geometric formalisms for characterizing meaning in general and will specifically demonstrate their use by investigating color terms and concepts. Testing will use data from a wide variety of societies, including the Mesoamerican Color Survey (MCS), a database of systematically collected categorization behaviors of 900 individuals who have communicated with one or more of 116 endangered or developing languages that are at various stages of color lexicon development. The MCS is largely in hand-written form, and one product of this project will be its full digitalization using modern computer science crowd-sourcing methods. Full digitalization of the MCS database will make it available for use by the global scientific community for the first time. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

这个跨学科的研究项目将开发和测试新的数学模型，探索通过这些语言的复杂性随着时间的推移而变化的语言中表示概念意义的方式。 项目调查人员还将研究社会中个人群体之间分享这种意义的方式。 该项目的模型将把概念的动态发展描述为一个几何系统，并将提供理解概念的语言表示的方法，以及一个社区的语义可能受到邻近社区语义影响的方式。 虽然这个项目将重点关注颜色术语在语言和社会中的演变方式，但这个项目的见解和信息将超越颜色表示领域，适用于任何一组概念，其中对象具有可以用数学方法评估和描述的相似性结构。 本项目期间将开发的办法和方法将具有实用性的各种情况的例子如下：（1）开发明确的和形式上可扩展的人工智能和类似人类分类和归类系统的机器人;（2）开发可用于增强快速全球信息传递能力的全球通信方法;（3）开发可用于增强快速全球信息传递能力的全球通信方法。以及（3）在关键系统（例如医疗诊断系统和运输系统）中构建用于信息表示的标准化系统。概念的形成和传播渗透在人类活动的各个方面。 它们在教育系统、运输系统的组织和设计、零售市场和消费品的实体和虚拟设计、医疗诊断的质量和风险分类、商业业绩和社会价值等方面发挥作用。 心理学家、语言学家、人类学家、计算机科学家和其他学者通过关注概念形成的具体例子来研究概念，同时试图理解这些概念系统是如何形成的。 受到关注的一个具体概念是颜色词如何“演变”以及社会成员如何理解和共享其概念含义。 颜色的概念化是一个重要的特殊情况，因为颜色刺激可以精确测量和容易复制，并且可以用数学精确描述一百万种颜色的人类感知空间。 该项目将专注于开发和测试数学模型，以捕捉颜色术语概念的分类和共享方式。 将要设计和测试的模型将使用几何形式来表征一般意义，并通过调查颜色术语和概念来具体演示其使用。 测试将使用来自各种社会的数据，包括中美洲颜色调查（MCS），这是一个系统收集的900个人分类行为的数据库，这些人与116种濒危或发展中语言中的一种或多种进行了交流，这些语言处于颜色词典发展的各个阶段。 MCS主要采用手写形式，该项目的一个产品将是使用现代计算机科学众包方法将其完全数字化。 监控监数据库的全面数字化将使其首次可供全球科学界使用。 该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛获得支持。