Thanks, Bob
At 4:55 PM -0500 11/12/08, Dom Widdows wrote:
>Dear Albrecht,
>
>In general I share you skepticism about finding small world networks
>everywhere, it seems to have become quite the in thing. (I happen to
>know that there are more than 6 degrees of separation between myself
>and Julius Caesar.)
>
>However, I wouldn't be too hasty to use ambiguity as evidence against
>a networked model of the lexicon. A good piece of work that analyzed
>this can be found in the PNAS paper of Sigman and Cecch:
>http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/sigman02pnas.html
>Beate Dorow and I have worked on this over the years, Beate's
>dissertation and Chapter 4 of "Geometry and Meaning" summarize a lot
>of findings. During this time, I started referring to ambiguous words
>in graphs as "semantic wormholes" - the fact that "change" can refer
>to different things enables you to join very distant parts of semantic
>space in a couple of hops. Ambiguity actually contributes to the
>connectedness of the graph - the thing you have to give up is the
>notion of transitivity in relationships, or any kind of triangle
>inequality in measuring distance. Either you need to split all your
>ambiguous words into separate nodes in the graph, or alternatively,
>accept that if nodes represent words which are ambiguous, distances
>are not measuring anything like distances in a metric space.
>
>This phenomenon is often used in making jokes, as your change example
>demonstrates.
>
>Perhaps my favourite of these goes something like this:
>Eager Young Minister: "Day to day, I find all the inspiration I need
>in the words of John and Paul."
>Elderly Bishop: "I quite agree ... though in my old age I've also come
>to a fresh appreciation for the words of George and Ringo."
>
>I like this one particularly because you have two semantic wormhole
>nodes pivotting in phase with each other ... though I suspect this
>analysis would rather ruin the joke for most people (which I why I put
>the joke first!)
>
>Best wishes,
>Dominic
>
>On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Albretch Mueller <lbrtchx at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Even though small-world networks may suffice to model some network
>> connections, in general and in particular regarding linguistics, I
>> could simply see some, as they say, "questionable" issues regarding
>> the relationships among words, in a dictionary or in corpora, as
>> "small-worlds networks" and I would assume you mean the direct (,
>> naive) and straight word-to-word immediate connection of words. Here
>> are just two points:
>> ~
>> * researchers have long suspected that just immediate, consecutive
>> immediacy does not best describe NLs even if text and talk are are
>> sequential. This is one of the reasons why they use Syntax Trees
>> ~
>> * also, even if you would build a DS to describe the huge amount of
>> Direct (or inverted) Acyclic Graphs (ADGs) sprouting out of and
>> sinking into every word, many relationships stated and/or latent (yet
>> describable) happen while communicating which are neither direct nor
>> acyclic, e. g., jokes and metaphors
>> ~
>> The other day I saw a homeless person on the streets with a sign,
> > that read: "I am like Obama, I want change."
>> ~
>> change as meant by Obama: in the US government/society
>> ~
>> change as it pertains to money: a small amount (a few coins) you may spare
>> ~
>> Now, this person was using more than just a sentence -language- to
>> persuasively entertain a joke (, which could be read differently by
>> different kinds of people) and the relationship he expressed was quite
>> a bit more engaging than the Aristotelian, linear/proportional one in
>> "the spring of life ..." referring to our youth ...
>> ~
>> How well -if possibly- would SWNs model these NL expressions?
>> ~
>> lbrtchx
>>
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>
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