Information 2012, 3, 229-255; doi:10.3390/info3020229
OPEN ACCESS
Article
The World Within Wikipedia: An Ecology of Mind
Andrew M. Olney1,✶, Rick Dale2 and Sidney K. D’Mello3
Authors
1Institute for Intelligent Systems
University of Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee, USA
2Cognitive and Information Sciences
University of California, Merced
Merced, California, USA
rdale@ucmerced.edu
3Computer Science and Psychology
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
sdmello@nd.edu
✶ Author to whom correspondence should be addressed
aolney@memphis.edu
Tel.: +1-901-678-5008
Fax: +1-901-678-1336
Publisher
MDPI
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
aka Molecular Diversity Preservation International
Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland
Received: 22 May 2012
Revised: 11 June 2012
Accepted: 12 June 2012
Published: 18 June 2012
Abstract: Human beings inherit an informational culture transmitted through spoken
and written language. A growing body of empirical work supports the mutual influence
between language and categorization, suggesting that our cognitive-linguistic environment
both reflects and shapes our understanding. By implication, artifacts that manifest this
cognitive-linguistic environment, such as Wikipedia, should represent language structure and
conceptual categorization in a way consistent with human behavior. We use this intuition
to guide the construction of a computational cognitive model, situated in Wikipedia, that
generates semantic association judgments. Our unsupervised model combines information
at the language structure and conceptual categorization levels to achieve state of the art
correlation with human ratings on semantic association tasks including WordSimilarity-353,
semantic feature production norms, word association, and false memory.
Keywords: association; comparison; semantic; feature; false memory; gist; activation;
Wikipedia; W3C3
