Distributional hypothesis
Encyclopedia
The Distributional Hypothesis in linguistics
is the theory that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth
. The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for Statistical Semantics
. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in Linguistics, it is now receiving attention in Cognitive Science
especially regarding the context of word use.
In recent years, the distributional hypothesis has provided the basis for the theory of similarity-based generalization in language learning: the idea that children can figure out how to use words they've rarely encountered before by generalizing about their use from distributions of similar words. The distributional hypothesis suggests that the more semantically similar two words are, the more distributionally similar they will be in turn, and thus the more that they will tend to occur in similar linguistic contexts. Whether or not this suggestions holds has significant implications for both the data-sparsity problem in computational modeling, and for the question of how children are able to learn language so rapidly given relatively impoverished input (this is also known as the problem of the poverty of the stimulus
).
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
is the theory that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth
J. R. Firth
John Rupert Firth , commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919-1928...
. The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for Statistical Semantics
Statistical semantics
Statistical semantics is the study of "how the statistical patterns of human word usage can be used to figure out what people mean, at least to a level sufficient for information access"...
. Although the Distributional Hypothesis originated in Linguistics, it is now receiving attention in Cognitive Science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
especially regarding the context of word use.
In recent years, the distributional hypothesis has provided the basis for the theory of similarity-based generalization in language learning: the idea that children can figure out how to use words they've rarely encountered before by generalizing about their use from distributions of similar words. The distributional hypothesis suggests that the more semantically similar two words are, the more distributionally similar they will be in turn, and thus the more that they will tend to occur in similar linguistic contexts. Whether or not this suggestions holds has significant implications for both the data-sparsity problem in computational modeling, and for the question of how children are able to learn language so rapidly given relatively impoverished input (this is also known as the problem of the poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...
).