Difference between revisions of "Distributional Hypothesis"

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The '''Distributional Hypothesis''' in Linguistics is that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings (Harris, 1954). The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth (1957). The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for [[Statistical Semantics]]. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in Linguistics, it is now receiving attention in Cognitive Science (McDonald and Ramscar, 2001).
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The '''Distributional Hypothesis''' is that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings (Harris, 1954). The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth (1957), and it is implicit in Weaver's (1955) discussion of [[Word Sense Disambiguation|word sense disambiguation]] (originally written as a memorandum, in 1949). The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for [[Statistical Semantics]]. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in Linguistics, it is now receiving attention in Cognitive Science (McDonald and Ramscar, 2001). The origin and theoretical basis of the Distributional Hypothesis is discussed by Sahlgren (2008).
  
 
==See also==
 
==See also==
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*[http://www.dmi.columbia.edu/zellig/ Zellig S. Harris]
 
*[http://www.dmi.columbia.edu/zellig/ Zellig S. Harris]
 
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Firth J.R. Firth]
 
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Firth J.R. Firth]
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*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Weaver Warren Weaver]
  
 
==References==
 
==References==
  
* Firth, J.R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. In ''Studies in Linguistic Analysis'', pp. 1-32. Oxford: Philological Society. Reprinted in F.R. Palmer (ed.), ''Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-1959'', London: Longman (1968).
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* Firth, J.R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. In ''Studies in Linguistic Analysis'', pp. 1-32. Oxford: Philological Society. Reprinted in F.R. Palmer (ed.), ''[http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Papers-R-Firth-1952-1959/dp/B000GQOMXO/ Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-1959]'', London: Longman (1968).
  
 
* Harris, Z. (1954). Distributional structure. ''Word'', 10(23): 146-162.
 
* Harris, Z. (1954). Distributional structure. ''Word'', 10(23): 146-162.
  
 
* McDonald, S., and Ramscar, M. (2001). [http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/~smcdonal/cogsci2001.pdf Testing the distributional hypothesis: The influence of context on judgements of semantic similarity]. In ''Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society'', pages 611-616.
 
* McDonald, S., and Ramscar, M. (2001). [http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/~smcdonal/cogsci2001.pdf Testing the distributional hypothesis: The influence of context on judgements of semantic similarity]. In ''Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society'', pages 611-616.
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* Weaver, W. (1955). Translation. In W.N. Locke and D.A. Booth (eds.), ''[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0837184347 Machine Translation of Languages]'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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* Sahlgren, Magnus (2008) [http://soda.swedish-ict.se/3941/1/sahlgren.distr-hypo.pdf The Distributional Hypothesis]. Rivista di Linguistica (Italian Journal of Linguistics), 20 (1). pp. 33-53.

Latest revision as of 01:52, 10 December 2010

The Distributional Hypothesis is that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings (Harris, 1954). The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth (1957), and it is implicit in Weaver's (1955) discussion of word sense disambiguation (originally written as a memorandum, in 1949). The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for Statistical Semantics. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in Linguistics, it is now receiving attention in Cognitive Science (McDonald and Ramscar, 2001). The origin and theoretical basis of the Distributional Hypothesis is discussed by Sahlgren (2008).

See also

External links

References

  • Firth, J.R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis, pp. 1-32. Oxford: Philological Society. Reprinted in F.R. Palmer (ed.), Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-1959, London: Longman (1968).
  • Harris, Z. (1954). Distributional structure. Word, 10(23): 146-162.