Co-occurrence frequency evaluated with large language corpora boosts semantic priming effects

Sentiment-Target Word Pair Extraction Model Using Statistical Analysis of Sentence Structures

Product information has been propagated online via forums and social media. Lots of merchandise are recommended via an expert system method and is considered for purchase by online comments or product reviews. For predicting people’s opinions on products, studying people’s thoughts via extracting information in documents is referred to as sentiment analysis. Finding sentiment-target word pairs is an important sentiment mining research issue. With the Korean language, as the predicate appears at the very end, it is not easy to find the exact word pairs without first identifying the syntactic structure of the sentence. In this study, we propose a model that parses sentence structures and extracts sentiment-target word pairs from the parse tree. The proposed model extracts the sentiment-target word pairs that appear in the sentence by using parsing and statistical methods. For extracting sentiment-target word pairs, this model uses a sentiment word extractor and a target word extractor. After testing data from 4000 movie reviews, the applicable model showed high performance in both accuracy 93.25 (+14.45) and F1-score 82.29 (+3.31) compared with others. However, improvements in the recall rate (−0.35) are needed and computational costs must be reduced.

Inferior parietal lobule is sensitive to different semantic similarity relations for concrete and abstract words

Similarity measures, the extent to which two concepts have similar meanings, are the key to understand how concepts are represented, with different theoretical perspectives relying on very different sources of data from which similarity can be calculated. While there is some commonality in similarity measures, the extent of their correlation is limited. Previous studies also suggested that the relative performance of different similarity measures may also vary depending on concept concreteness and that the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) may be involved in the integration of conceptual features in a multimodal system for the semantic categorization. Here, we tested for the first time whether theory-based similarity measures predict the pattern of brain activity in the IPL differently for abstract and concrete concepts. English speakers performed a semantic decision task, while we recorded their brain activity in IPL through fNIRS. Using representational similarity analysis, results indicated that the neural representational similarity in IPL conformed to the lexical co-occurrence among concrete concepts (regardless of the hemisphere) and to the affective similarity among abstract concepts in the left hemisphere only, implying that semantic representations of abstract and concrete concepts are characterized along different organizational principles in the IPL. We observed null results for the decoding accuracy. Our study suggests that the use of the representational similarity analysis as a complementary analysis to the decoding accuracy is a promising tool to reveal similarity patterns between theoretical models and brain activity recorded through fNIRS.

CLAD: A corpus-derived Chinese Lexical Association Database

The application of word associations has become increasingly widespread. However, the association norms produced by traditional free association tests tend not to exceed 10,000 stimulus words, making the number of associated words too small to be representative of the overall language. In this study we used text corpora totaling over 400 million Chinese words, along with a multitude of association measures, to automatically construct a Chinese Lexical Association Database (CLAD) comprising the lexical association of over 80,000 words. Comparison of the CLAD with a database of traditional Chinese word association norms shows that word associations extracted from large text corpora are similar in strength to those elicited from free association tests but contain a much greater number of associative word pairs. Additionally, the relatively small numbers of participants involved in the creation of traditional norms result in relatively coarse scales of association measurement, whereas the differentiation of association strengths is greatly enhanced in the CLAD. The CLAD provides researchers with a great supplement to traditional word association norms. A query website at www.chinesereadability.net/LexicalAssociation/CLAD/ affords access to the database.