Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: A Computational Theory and Educational Curriculum
William J. Rapaport, Michael W. Kibby · PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) · 2002
Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for an unknown word in a text by reasoning from textual clues, prior knowledge, and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. Published strategies for doing CVA vaguely and unhelpfully tell the reader to “guess”. AI algorithms for CVA can fill in the details that replace “guessing ” by “computing”; these details can then be converted to a curriculum that can be taught to students to improve their reading comprehension. Such algorithms also suggest a way out of the Chinese Room and show how holistic semantics can withstand certain objections. 1 Computational Philosophy and Philosophical Computation Computer science in general, and AI in particular, have a lot to give to philosophy, and vice versa, as Daniel Dennett once noted (1978: 126; cf. Rapaport 1986b). This essay discusses an interdisciplinary, applied cognitive-science research project that exhibits how philosophy can influence AI, how AI can influence philosophy, and how both can influence educational practice. I 1 take “computational philosophy ” to be the application of computational (i.e., algorithmic) solutions to philosophical problems. 2 An example from my own research would be the use of the SNePS knowledge-