Latent Semantic Distance Between Chinese Basic Words and Non-basic Words

Abstract

What determines the “basicness” of words still remains a challenging question in creating basic lexicons and basic wordlists. Since frequency and dispersion seem to be the most dominant criteria, it is questioned that whether contextual factors also help to define the concept of “basicness.” From the perspective of the distributional model, meanings are represented through the interaction between words and their contexts. Hence, this research aims to examine an existing wordlist and tentatively take it as the standard of “basicness,” trying to seek the differences between “basic words” and “non-basic words” based on their occurrences in different texts. Two experiments were conducted to answer the research questions. The first calculated the “latent semantic distances” between basic words and non-basic words. The second calculated and examined the “near neighbors” of basic word and non-basic words. It has been discovered that basic words tend to occur in more similar texts than non-basic words do; in addition, the near neighbors of basic words tend to be more “basic”, too. This research contributes to providing a more “contextual” perspective in exploring “basicness.”