Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence

Kevin Lund, Curt Burgess
1996 Behavoir research methods, instruments & computers  
A procedure that processes a corpus of text and produces numeric vectors containing information about its meanings for each word is presented. This procedure is applied to a large corpus of natural language text taken from Usenet, and the resulting vectors are examined to determine what information is contained within them. These vectors provide the coordinates in a high-dimensional space in which word relationships can be analyzed. Analyses of both vector similarity and multidimensional
more » ... demonstrate that there is significant semantic information carried in the vectors. A comparison of vector similarity with human reaction times in a single-word priming experiment is presented. These vectors provide the basis for a representational model of semantic memory, hyperspace analogue to language (HAL).
doi:10.3758/bf03204766 fatcat:eniguyjdbje2djxjlmi5lkdsaq