Page:The World Within Wikipedia： An Ecology of Mind.pdf/1

 Information 2012, 3, 229-255; doi:10.3390/info3020229

OPEN ACCESS Rh Rh Rh Article

Andrew M. Olney1,✶, Rick Dale2 and Sidney K. D’Mello3

Authors

1Institute for Intelligent Systems

University of Memphis

2Cognitive and Information Sciences

University of California, Merced

rdale@ucmerced.edu

3Computer Science and Psychology

University of Notre Dame

sdmello@nd.edu

✶ Author to whom correspondence should be addressed

aolney@memphis.edu

Tel.: +1-901-678-5008

Fax: +1-901-678-1336

Publisher

MDPI

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

aka Molecular Diversity Preservation International

Received: 22 May 2012

Revised: 11 June 2012

Accepted: 12 June 2012

Published: 18 June 2012

Abstract: Human beings inherit an informational culture transmitted through spoken and written language. A growing body of empirical work supports the mutual influence between language and categorization, suggesting that our cognitive-linguistic environment both reflects and shapes our understanding. By implication, artifacts that manifest this cognitive-linguistic environment, such as Wikipedia, should represent language structure and conceptual categorization in a way consistent with human behavior. We use this intuition to guide the construction of a computational cognitive model, situated in Wikipedia, that generates semantic association judgments. Our unsupervised model combines information at the language structure and conceptual categorization levels to achieve state of the art correlation with human ratings on semantic association tasks including WordSimilarity-353, semantic feature production norms, word association, and false memory.

Keywords: association; comparison; semantic; feature; false memory; gist; activation; Wikipedia; W3C3