How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.

/pdf/a-solution-to-plato-s-problem-the-latent-semantic-analysis-4jfk7ozfms.pdf

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge.

https://www.cns.nyu.edu/~msl/courses/2223/Readings/Rosch-CogPsych1976.pdf

Basic objects in natural categories

In this article we present a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. The pictures have been standardized on four variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the four measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed.

/pdf/a-standardized-set-of-260-pictures-norms-for-name-agreement-538pmnf0w6.pdf

A standardized set of 260 pictures: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity.

http://matt.colorado.edu/teaching/categories/rm75.pdf

Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/88/5/375.pdf

W. F. Twaddell

Papers

Computational analysis of present-day American English