Estimating Semantic Transparency of Constituents of English Compounds and Two-Character Chinese Words using Latent Semantic Analysis

Estimating Semantic Transparency of Constituents of English Compounds and Two-Character Chinese Words using Latent Semantic Analysis Hsueh-Cheng Wang (hchengwang@gmail.com) Li-Chuan Hsu (lchsu@mail.cmu.edu.tw) Yi-Min Tien (tien@mercury.csmu.edu.tw) Marc Pomplun (marc@cs.umb.edu) Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA 02125 USA Abstract The constituents of English compounds (e.g., butter and fly for butterfly) and two-character Chinese words may differ in meaning from the whole word. Furthermore, the meanings of the words containing the same constituent (e.g., butter in “butterfingers”, or “buttermilk”) may or may not be consistent. Estimating semantic transparency of a constituent is usually difficult and subjective because of these uncertainties and ambiguities. It is rather unexplored why a constituent is considered transparent/opaque by raters, and how its polysemy correlates to its transparency. We propose a computational method for predicting semantic transparency based on Latent Semantic Analysis. We computed the primary meaning of a constituent by a clustering analysis and compared it to the whole-word meaning. The proposed method successfully predicted participants’ transparency ratings, and may explain the cognitive processes in raters when classifying semantic transparency of English compounds and two-character Chinese words. Keywords: compound words; semantic transparency; latent semantic analysis; Chinese; clustering. Introduction A compound word is a word composed of at least two free lexemes that refer to a new concept. Compound words with two constituents are defined as semantically transparent (transparent-transparent, referred to as TT, see Frisson, Niswander-Klement, & Pollatsek, 2008) when the whole word meaning can be grasped through its individual constituents, such as cookbook. Compound words are regarded as semantically opaque (opaque-opaque, OO), when their meaning cannot be fully derived from its constituents, e.g., cocktail. Some compound words are considered partially opaque (opaque-transparent, OT, or transparent-opaque, TO) when the primary meaning of one of the constituents is related to the meaning of the compound, such as butterfly or staircase, respectively. Typically, transparency ratings are the most common method to obtain transparency information. Transparency rating experiments have used target words that differed substantially in their estimated transparency by researchers or a group of participants. For instance, Pollatsek and Hyona (2005) selected 80 compound words, 40 of which they assumed to be semantically transparent, and the other 40 to be opaque. They asked eight participants to rate these words regarding their transparency using a 7-point scale (1 for totally transparent and 7 for totally opaque), and the ratings were clearly lower for the supposedly transparent sets than for the supposedly opaque ones. Similarly, Frisson et al. (2008) asked 40 participants to rate transparency in terms of appropriate categories (e.g., opaque-transparent (OT), transparent-opaque (TO), opaque-opaque (OO), and transparent-transparent (TT)), and there was good agreement between the participants’ choices and the predefined classification by Frisson et al. (2008). The proportion of participants’ choices agreeing with the predefined classification was 65% for OO, 71% for OT, 65% for TO, and 86% for TT. Moreover, the proportion of participants classifying at least one of the constituents as opaque for the predefined opaque words was very high: 95% for OO, 93% for OT and 95% for TO. Inhoff et al. (2008) selected “headed” and “tailed” compound words, i.e., compound words whose meaning was primarily defined by their first or second constituents, respectively. They had 13 participants rate 390 compound words using an 11-point scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 indicated that the meaning of the compound was solely associated with the meaning of the first constituent, while 10 denoted that the meaning of the compound was solely associated with the one of the second constituent. Compounds with mean ratings below 4 (mean: 3.34) or above 6 (mean: 7.18) were considered to be headed or tailed, respectively. It is important to notice that the definition of headed and tailed compound words might not equal the TO and OT conditions discussed above. For example, the second constituent of a headed compound may be opaque or transparent, as long as its meaning is less closely related to the compound than the meaning of the first constituent is. Two-character Chinese words, similar to English compound words, differ in how the meanings of the first and second characters relate to the meaning of the word. Some two-character Chinese words are semantically transparent, i.e., both characters are transparently related to the meaning of the whole word. Other words are fully opaque, i.e., the meaning of neither constituent is related to the meaning of the compound, or partially opaque. Table 1 lists some examples of transparent, opaque, and partially opaque Chinese words. According to the estimation of Zhou and Marslen-Wilson (1995), 74% of Chinese words are made up of two characters, although some words consist of only one