Conceptual associations

[Richard]

In the Linguistics course, I use the Edinburgh Association Thesaurus to look at associations. This is a database of the elicited associations for words from 100 respondents. Unfortunately, as I was checking through the materials for the course to teach next semester, I found that the website had disappeared (the whole domain seems to have gone following a government reorganisation). Still wanting to use the database, I looked on archive.org (https://web.archive.org/web/20160826041 ... .rl.ac.uk/) and found a link to download an standalone version (for Windows only). The Query function in this program works in the same way as the old website. You input a word and it tells you what other words people give as associations (e.g. 'Christmas' gives 'tree' and 'card' as the top 2 returns).

The standalone version has other neat functions though. You can put in 2 words and it will search for the shortest path between them. I asked Steve to give me 2 words and he chose 'chocolate' and 'vampire'. The program found a 5-node path between these 2 words: chocolate - cream- clotted - blood - vampire.

A task for the holidays! Can you come up with 2 words that have a longer minimum path between them?

Enjoy yourselves.

[punjaporn]

I can’t find any of those, but have learned how research can be fun.
“Research – work – headache – beer – fun”

[Richard]

A website similar to the Edinburgh one that does work is https://smallworldofwords.org/en/project/explore

This seems useful for finding immediate associates of words.