The anatomy of specialized knowledge: Comparing experts and non-experts through associations, frames and language models
-
Špela Vintar
and
Amanda Saksida
Abstract
We explore specialized knowledge and aim to show that expert conceptual spaces differ from those of non-experts. This rather broad research question is addressed from different perspectives: first we collect free associations to selected stimulus terms from the domain of karstology from experts and non-experts, demonstrating that the underlying knowledge affects the associative inventory and that the overlap between both groups is low. Next, we look for knowledge frames which might shape the expert responses by activating conceptual links, and compare them to corpus-derived frames. Finally, we train neural language models on specialized versus general corpora to see whether the neural semantic space as represented by the cosine distance resembles the semantic spaces obtained through human associations. Results show that human associations indeed reflect knowledge frames, but that the overlap with the trained word embeddings is again low, indicating inherent differences between the associative semantic proximity in experts and non-experts, and between humans and neural meaning representations.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Thematic Part: Kultur und Wörterbücher / Culture and dictionaries [Culture et dictionnaires]
- Introduction
- Proverbs as an agent of cultural wisdom and identity among the Xhosa speaking people
- The lexicon and culture – culture and the lexicon
- Culture in the OED online Phrases and Quotations
- Representation of culture-bound items in a culture dictionary for German readers
- Unpacking colonialist and racist ideologies in historical German lexicons: A critical analysis of the Afrika Hand-Lexikon (1885) and similar reference books
- Women in Lexicography: a collaborative citizens project
- Non-thematic Part
- Specialised language and conceptual knowledge in lexicographic portals
- The anatomy of specialized knowledge: Comparing experts and non-experts through associations, frames and language models
- The multifunctional LBC-Corpora: different aims depending on the user
- A novel way of extracting full-fledged terminologies from multilingual texts
- Creating specialised dictionaries using LexO
- Theoretical Considerations on AI-based Business Models for Lexicography
- From Great Britain to the Spanish Philippines via British India… and back
- „Als Ziel gilt, den Wortinhalt allseits auszuleuchten, auch kleinste Facetten sichtbar zu machen“ – Funktionswörter im Schweizerischen Idiotikon / Wörterbuch der schweizerdeutschen Sprache
- Lexicography in Higher Education
- „Ein Mann, ein Wort, viele EMLexler, ein Wörterbuch“
- “Dictionaries and Society” – Conference Report about XX EURALEX in Mannheim
- Reviews
- Dictionnaire Poche Larousse 2023, 76 000 définitions, noms communs, noms propres. Paris: Larousse Dictionnaires, 2022, 1095 pp.
- The Bloomsbury Handbook of Lexicography. Second Edition. Edited by Howard Jackson. London/New York/Oxford/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, XXIII + 473 pp.
