Submitted by Administrator on Mon, 27/01/2014 - 16:20
Researchers at the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain (CSLB) have recently conducted a large concept property norming study and have made the resultant set of property norms publically available as a free lexical resource. The CSLB norming study is described in an upcoming issue of Behaviour Research Methods.
Knowledge about familiar concepts (like airplane, banana, or tiger) allows us to perceive the word as meaningful and represent information efficiently. Theories of the representation and processing of conceptual knowledge have been greatly enhanced by models that describe and make use of specific information about a set of concepts. This information is often gathered through large property norming projects, where a large number of volunteers describe what they know about everyday objects.
The CSLB property norm study is one of the largest such studies to date, and the information being made available is designed to meet the needs of many different disciplines interested in conceptual knowledge, including cognitive psychology and computational linguistics. In particular, the norms give all information listed by two or more participants, and detail the considerable linguistic variation that underlies each normalized feature label (for apple, for example, "tastes good", "is tasty", "is delicious", and "is yummy" are all mapped to the normalized feature label is tasty).
Semantic similarity scores for every pair of concepts in the norms are also provided.
The researchers hope that the greater detail available in the CSLB norms should further promote the development of models of conceptual knowledge. The norms can be downloaded at http:\\csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk/propertynorms/.
Article by Barry Devereux
Senior Research Associate, CSLB