Applying computational approaches for the representation of word meaning
Joe Levy, University of Roehampton
Date and time: Thursday 14th March 2013 at 16:00
Location: UG09, Learning Centre
Host: John Bullinaria
There has been a great deal of research about methods for representing word or concept meaning, both in linguistic/technological terms and in psychological/neuroscientific ones. A promising method in computational linguistics has been to measure the intuition that a word’s meaning is a function of the other words it co-occurs with by counting these words as they occur in large text corpora. I will present results from work with John Bullinaria that demonstrate just how well a simple co-occurrence method can perform on various evaluation tasks and how it can improve a model of fMRI activation associated with word and concept meaning.
Joe Levy is a cognitive scientist whose research interests include computational modelling of language phenomena and the cognitive neuroscience of human social cognition and language. After a degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, he completed a PhD and postdoctoral research in cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh. Since then he has worked at Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Greenwich and is currently a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton.