*** Everyone Welcome! No need to book in advance***
Date: Thursday 16th March
Time: 16:00-17:00
Room: College Building C133
Dr Joe Levy (University of Roehampton)
'Why Statistical Representations of Word Meaning are Interesting for Psychology'
For the last
twenty years there has been increasing interest in the use of computational
methods to capture certain aspects of word meaning. These methods capture how
words are used by looking at the other words that they co-occur with, building
patterns of co-occurrence or “semantic vectors” that can be used to measure the
semantic distances between words. The techniques used have been driven by
technological concerns but there has always been an interest in them from some
psychologists. I will describe some current techniques and argue that semantic
vectors may be able to play an important role in computational/statistical
models of human behaviour. I will illustrate these points by examining the use
of semantic vector methods in solving vocabulary multiple-choice tests.
I am a
cognitive scientist with interests in language, memory and social cognition. I
have used techniques from computational modelling, cognitive psychology and
cognitive neuroscience.
Along
with colleagues from Roehampton, recent projects have included:
the use
of experimental methods, EEG and fMRI to examine action observation and
perspective taking; the use of fMRI to measure the association of the default
mode network and measures of empathy; accounting for variation in children’s
reading performance with measures of metacognition.
A current
focus is work with my colleague John Bullinaria (University of Birmingham) that
continues our long collaboration of working on computational measures of word
meaning. Our techniques have been very successful in generating numerical
representations of the patterns of usage of different words in large bodies of
text. The differences or distances between these "semantic vectors” can be
shown to reflect the semantic relationships between different words. Recently,
we have applied our technique to successfully improve models of cortical
activation during word meaning processing tasks. Currently, along with Dr
Samantha McCormick at Roehampton, we are looking at the various ways our
semantic vectors can explain the linguistic structure of and human performance
on vocabulary multiple choice tests. Plans for the future include exploring
further applications of these semantic representations in the modelling of
linguistic, cognitive and neuroscientific phenomena.
