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Word Activation Forces: Distinctive Statistics Revealing Word Associations

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Abstract

Word activation has caused ample investigations in many different scientific areas. Various theories have long been debated in predicting and interpreting the fundamental language phenomenon. From a perspective of mechanics, this study considers the word activations as imaginary forces and quantifies their amount by adapting the formula of the universal gravitation to the corresponding imaginary masses and distance that are estimated via the statistics of language experience. In large scale experiments, we found that the word activation forces not only straightforwardly predict various kinds of word activations, but also lead to a simple and human-comparably accurate measure to identify word closest associates including synonyms, near-synonyms, antonyms and similar functional words. The plausibility of identified closest associates with over 10,000 popular English words is highly inspiring.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Jun Guo, Guang Chen & Weiran Xu

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  1. Jun Guo
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  2. Guang Chen
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  3. Weiran Xu
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Correspondence to Jun Guo.

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Guo, J., Chen, G. & Xu, W. Word Activation Forces: Distinctive Statistics Revealing Word Associations. Wireless Pers Commun 66, 511–521 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-012-0740-1

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