Towards a resource based on users’ knowledge to overcome the Tip of the Tongue problem.

Michael Zock, Chris Biemann


Abstract
Language production is largely a matter of words which, in the case of access problems, can be searched for in an external resource (lexicon, thesaurus). In this kind of dialogue the user provides the momentarily available knowledge concerning the target and the system responds with the best guess(es) it can make given this input. As tip-of-the-tongue (ToT)-studies have shown, people always have some knowledge concerning the target (meaning fragments, number of syllables, ...) even if its complete form is eluding them. We will show here how to tap on this knowledge to build a resource likely to help authors (speakers/writers) to overcome the ToT-problem. Yet, before doing so we need a better understanding of the various kinds of knowledge people have when looking for a word. To this end, we asked crowdworkers to provide some cues to describe a given target and to specify then how each one of them relates to the target, in the hope that this could help others to find the elusive word. Next, we checked how well a given search strategy worked when being applied to differently built lexical networks. The results showed quite dramatic differences, which is not really surprising. After all, different networks are built for different purposes; hence each one of them is more or less suited for a given task. What was more surprising though is the fact that the relational information given by the users did not allow us to find the elusive word in WordNet better than without it.
Anthology ID:
W16-5308
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex - V)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Michael Zock, Alessandro Lenci, Stefan Evert
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
57–68
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-5308
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Zock and Chris Biemann. 2016. Towards a resource based on users’ knowledge to overcome the Tip of the Tongue problem.. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex - V), pages 57–68, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a resource based on users’ knowledge to overcome the Tip of the Tongue problem. (Zock & Biemann, CogALex 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-5308.pdf