Abstract
This paper applies some recent methods involving semantic vectors and their combination operations to some very traditional questions, including the discovery of similarities and differences between the four Gospels, relationships between individuals, and the identification of geopolitical regions and leaders in the ancient world. In the process, we employ several methods from linear algebra and vector space models, some of which are of particular importance in quantum mechanics and quantum logic.
Our conclusions are in general positive: the vector methods do a good job of capturing well-known facts about the Bible, its authors, and relationships between people and places mentioned in the Bible. On the more specific topic of quantum as opposed to other approaches, our conclusions are more mixed: on the whole, we do not find evidence for preferring vector methods that are directly associated with quantum mechanics over vector methods developed independently of quantum mechanics. We suggest that this argues for synthesis rather than division between classical and quantum models for information processing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Birkhoff, G., von Neumann, J.: The logic of quantum mechanics. Annals of Mathematics 37, 823–843 (1936)
van Rijsbergen, C.: The Geometry of Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Widdows, D.: Geometry and Meaning. CSLI publications, Stanford (2004)
Salton, G., McGill, M.: Introduction to modern information retrieval. McGraw-Hill, New York (1983)
Landauer, T., Dumais, S.: A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition. Psychological Review 104(2), 211–240 (1997)
Widdows, D., Higgins, M.: Geometric ordering of concepts, logical disjunction, learning by induction, and spatial indexing. In: Compositional Connectionism in Cognitive Science, Washington, DC. AAAI Fall Symposium Series (October 2004)
Schütze, H.: Automatic word sense discrimination. Computational Linguistics 24(1), 97–124 (1998)
Widdows, D., Cederberg, S., Dorow, B.: Visualisation techniques for analysing meaning. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds.) TSD 2002. LNCS, vol. 2448, pp. 107–115. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Sahlgren, M., Holst, A., Kanerva, P.: Permutations as a means to encode order in word space. In: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2008), Washington D.C. (2008)
Schvaneveldt, R.W.: Pathfinder associative networks: studies in knowledge organization. Ablex Publishing Corp., Norwood (1990)
Widdows, D., Ferraro, K.: Semantic vectors: A scalable open source package and online technology management application. In: Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakesh, Morroco (2008)
Papadimitriou, C.H., Tamaki, H., Raghavan, P., Vempala, S.: Latent semantic indexing: A probabilistic analysis. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 61(2), 217–235 (2000)
Widdows, D.: Semantic vectors products. In: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Quantum Interaction, Oxford, UK (2008)
Jones, M.N., Mewhort, D.J.K.: Representing word meaning and word information in a composite holographic lexicon. Psych. Review 114(1) (2007)
Manning, C.D., Schütze, H.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Widdows, K.: Fourth Witness. Writersworld Limited (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Widdows, D., Cohen, T. (2009). Semantic Vector Combinations and the Synoptic Gospels. In: Bruza, P., Sofge, D., Lawless, W., van Rijsbergen, K., Klusch, M. (eds) Quantum Interaction. QI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5494. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00834-4_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00834-4_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00833-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00834-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)