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George A. Miller |
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| George A. Miller is a famous psychological professor at Princeton University. His most work is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, which is published in 1956. Miller is well-known for the linguistic development of WordNet. This development began in 1985.
George A. Miller was born in Charleston West Virginia in1920. He graduated from Harvard in 1946 with a PhD in Experimental Psychology. He then stayed and spent time at Harvard working mostly on psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology; and with Jerome Bruner co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies. He then did work on modeling the information structures in the mind and out of that came the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram). In 1956 The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two was published in the Psychological Review. After spending time at Harvard he then spent time at Rockefeller, and then on to Princeton where he remains today. He has recently worked on the semantics of individual words, and out of that has come the large computer program called WordNet (an online lexical database), and the Reader (incorporates WordNet into a reading environment).
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two Miller showed a number of remarkable coincidences between the channel capacity of a number of human cognitive and perceptual tasks. In each case, the effective channel capacity is equivalent to between 5 and 9 equally-weighted error-less choices: on average, about 2.5 bits of information. Miller hypothesized that these may all be due to some common but unknown mechanism. The concept of this limit is illustrated by imagining the patterns on the faces of deaths. It is easy for many people to visualize each of the six faces. Now imagine seven dots, eight dots, nine dots, ten dots, and so on. At some point it becomes impossible to visualize the dots as a single pattern (a process known as subitising), and one thinks of, say, eight as two groups of four. The upper limit of your visualization of a number represented as dots is your subitising limit for that exercise. The film Rain Man, portrayed a fictitious autistic savant, who was able to visualize the number represented by an entire box of matches spilled on the floor. Therefore one might suppose that this limit is an arbitrary limit imposed by our cognition rather than necessarily being a physical limit.
Channel Capacity Channel capacity, shown often as "C" in communication formulas, is the amount of discrete information bits that a defined area or segment in a communications medium can hold. The total number of bits of information that the entire wire may carry is not expanded by breaking it into smaller sub-segments. Wordnet : An Electronic Lexical Database (Language, Speech and Communication)
WordNet is a semantic lexicon for the English Language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets.
WordNet was invented and is being maintained at the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under the direction of psychology professor George A. Miller. WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. WordNet, an electronic lexical database, is considered to be the most important resource available to researchers in computational linguistics, text analysis, and many related areas. Its design is inspired by current psycholinguistic and computational theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexicalized concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. The purpose of this volume is twofold. First, it discusses the design of WordNet and the theoretical motivations behind it. Second, it provides a survey of representative applications, including word sense identification, information retrieval, selectional preferences of verbs, and lexical chains. It is organized according to the principles governing the human lexical memory. WordNet was started in 1985 at Princeton as an idea to aid in searching dictionaries conceptually instead of the conventional alphabetical way. WordNet starts by dividing words into categories, which are, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. WordNet contains about 57, 000 nouns organized into about 48, 000 word meanings. To try my best to explain WordNet I will stick with nouns; superordinate tems plus distinguishing features equals the noun definition in WordNet. This is the basic equation for organizing noun files. To see the advantages that WordNet has over a dictionary I will give you the noun example of'tree, 'from the Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database, co-authored by George Miller. The best way to see the advantage of WordNet is to look at disadvantages of the dictionary. In a dictionary'tree'would be given the definition of plant (the superordinate term) plus a meaning that describes how this noun is different from all others. The first thing that would be missing in the'dictionary'definition would be information about the superordinate term (plant). Does a tree have roots? Is it a living thing? What kind of'plant'are they refering to? These are questions that anyone can answer, but only because we are using such a simple word as an example. Secondly, no coordinate terms are offered. A tree is a plant, so what other kinds of plants are there? To find this answer you would have to scan the dictionaries definitions A-Z. Third if you have more questions about a tree, like what kinds are there, and how many different kinds are there, the information is most likely in there, but hard to get to when needed. Lastly, a dictionary provides a definition to something that is assumed the reader already knows something about. If I am absolutely unfamiliar with what a tree is, a definition of'a plant, with a trunk'is not going to help me. The design that lexicographers used for nouns was a branch of words connected by an ISA statement (ex: oak@tree@plant@organism)(@represents ISA). This is a way to organize the word into the WordNet. WordNet is considered to be the most important resource available to researchers in computational linguistics, text analysis, and many related areas. Its design is inspired by current psycholinguistic and computational theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexicalized concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.
The purpose of this volume is twofold. First, it discusses the design of WordNet and the theoretical motivations behind it. Second, it provides a survey of representative applications, including word sense identification, information retrieval, selectional preferences of verbs, and lexical chains.
Contributors: Reem Al-Halimi, Robert C. Berwick, J. F. M. Burg, Martin Chodorow, Christiane Fellbaum, Joachim Grabowski, Sanda Harabagiu, Marti A. Hearst, Graeme Hirst, Douglas A. Jones, Rick Kazman, Karen T. Kohl, Shari Landes, Claudia Leacock, George A. Miller, Katherine J. Miller, Dan Moldovan, Naoyuki Nomura, Uta Priss, Philip Resnik, David St-Onge, Randee Tengi, Reind P. van de Riet, Ellen Voorhees.
Different relations link the synonym sets. The purpose of this volume is twofold. First, it discusses the design of WordNet and the theoretical motivations behind it. Second, it provides a survey of representative applications, including word sense identification, information retrieval, selectional preferences of verbs, and lexical chains.
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