The featural and unitary semantic space hypothesis (FUSS)

hypothesis of the representation of the meaning of object and action
words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on
the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of
words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of
which are organized according to modality. Second, it is assumed that
conceptual featural representations are bound into lexico-semantic
representations that provide an interface between conceptual knowledge
and other linguistic information (syntax and phonology). Finally, the
FUSS model employs the same principles and tools for objects and
actions, modeling both domains in a single semantic space. The
plausibility of the model is established by showing that it can
capture generalizations presented in the literature, in particular
those related to category-related deficits, and show that it can
predict semantic effects in behavioral experiments for object and
action words better than other models such as Latent Semantic Analysis
(Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and similarity metrics derived from Wordnet
(Miller and Fellbaum, 1991).


If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact:

Alissa Melinger

This seminar series is jointly organized by the Department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics and the European Post-Graduate
College in Language Technology and Cognitive Systems.

A current version of the program for this term can be found at:

http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/colloquium/