PROBABILITY
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P222
2025-09-29
309
PROBABILITY
The likelihood of a linguistic item being present.
Lexical probability. In many theories of lexical access, multiple candidates (possible matches) are activated once part of a word has been heard. For example, an initial syllable /f ə / might activate FORBID, FORGET, FERMENT, FORSAKE. The candidates are activated to different degrees, depending upon their frequency: FORGET is a strong candidate, FORSAKE a weaker one. Part of the process of word recognition thus involves an assessment by the listener of the probability that one particular item is present rather than any other. This can be represented in the formula: f / Σ f where f is the frequency of a particular candidate and Σ f is the sum of frequencies of all candidates.
Syntactic probability. A knowledge of syntactic structure often enables the listener or reader to guess the word-class of an upcoming item. For example, if the reader sees THE, the likelihood is that the next item will either be an adjective or a noun. If THE is followed by OLD, there is an even greater likelihood that a noun will follow. Once the NounPhrase is complete (THE OLD MAN) there is then a likelihood that the next item will be a verb. The extent to which currently available syntactic structure enables one to predict future constituents is known as transitional probability. The term can also refer to the collocationally determined predictability of a specific word: for example, one can say that FOR has a high transitional probability after the verb WAIT.
Many engineering solutions in Artificial Intelligence which simulate the parsing of text involve no semantic component but are based upon a corpus analysis which indicates how probable each lexical item is in the target genre and what syntactic patterns and word-class sequences are most prevalent. This enables the program to predict what will come next, with increasing degrees of success as a sentence proceeds.
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