Semantic Networks and Word Associations
Both in class and in the textbook, we have learned about the concept of information networks. While reading Chapter 13, I was particularly interested in the idea of a semantic network, described by the textbook as a type of information network where “nodes literally represent concepts, and edges represent some kind of logical or perceived relationship between the concepts”. The textbook also mentioned that word association studies have been used to understand how these types of semantic networks worked.
While exploring these ideas, I came across the source I chose for this blog post, a project called the Word Associations Network. The project allows you to essentially see the semantic network for any word by showing you all of the associations with any given word. The project works by using an associative dictionary (categorizing words into psychological meaning and perception/analogical meaning), an explanatory dictionary (consisting of every word’s lexical meaning) and a picture dictionary (consisting of visual representations of the meaning of words). The website therefore basically takes any word and shows you all its associated words. You can then click on any of the provided associated words and click those words to reveal what words that word is then associated with to show paths between many seemingly distant words. For example, I entered the word “universe”, which was associated with many different words including “Einstein” which I decided to click to see what would words would come up. I then found that “Einstein” was associated with “condensation” which led me to “equilibrium”, which unintentionally and funnily led me to “Nash”. Without intending to do so, this tool was able to create for me a path between “universe”, a word I arbitrarily chose, to “Nash”, a word related to concepts we have covered in class! Using this website, it is therefore possible to actually construct a semantic network with any word as a starting point and then subsequently understand the breakdown, structure and processes involved in that network.
This clearly relates to the idea of semantic networks we have discussed throughout the course. The unexpectedly short paths between such seemingly far apart ideas reflects the concept of six degrees of separation covered earlier in the course. This also reflects what Vannevar Bush called associative memory which forms our conscious thought processes and makes up semantic networks.
https://wordassociations.net/en