Unveiling middle-level concepts through frequency trajectories and peaks analysis
Luigi Di, Alice Ruggeri · 2019
Natural language development and learning begins with a few terms, often related to concepts associated to perception, in general neither too general nor too specific, gradually specializing and extending to abstract concepts. A linguistic middle-level can be considered as a lexical base on which a language oriented towards more complex communications develops in adulthood. Learning can extend from generic to specific terms (usually a child learns first the term "dog", then the term "dachshund"), or from specific to generic ("dog" → "mammal"). Thus, a middle-level includes all those terms that are halfway, in the taxonomic sense, between generic and specific concepts. In this paper we propose a computational approach to identify a middle-level relying on Wikipedia as input corpus and WordNet as lexical-semantic resource. An experimentation based on graded readings shows favourable results. The impact of this work could touch different fields, e.g., the automatic evaluation of the complexity of a text by computational approaches, rather than psychological and linguistic studies related to the language use.