Generating semantic maps through multidimensional scaling: linguistic applications and theory

Abstract

This paper reports on the state-of-the-art in application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques to create semantic maps in linguistic research. MDS refers to a statistical technique that represents objects (lexical items, linguistic contexts, languages, etc.) as points in a space so that close similarity between the objects corresponds to close distances between the corresponding points in the representation. We focus on the use of MDS in combination with parallel corpus data as used in research on cross-linguistic variation. We first introduce the mathematical foundations of MDS and then give an exhaustive overview of past research that employs MDS techniques in combination with parallel corpus data. We propose a set of terminology to succinctly describe the key parameters of a particular MDS application. We then show that this computational methodology is theory-neutral, i.e. it can be employed to answer research questions in a variety of linguistic theoretical frameworks. Finally, we show how this leads to two lines of future developments for MDS research in linguistics.

The inside out model of emotion recognition: how the shape of one’s internal emotional landscape influences the recognition of others’ emotions

“…Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a statistical technique that represents objects (emotional images, lexical items etc.) as points in multidimensional space wherein close similarity between objects corresponds to close distances between the corresponding points in the representation 92 . The distance between points in multidimensional space can then be plotted (see Fig.…”

Not…Until across European Languages: A Parallel Corpus Study

“…This resembles the approaches in Wälchli and Cysouw (2012), Wälchli (2018Wälchli ( /2019, and has been dubbed Translation Mining by van der Klis et al (2017). The methodology will be introduced in Section 3, but see van der Klis and Tellings (2022) for a more exhaustive overview. A special feature of this paper is that we do not only use Translation Mining to investigate cross-linguistic variation in a lexical domain (in our case, choice of connective), but also to study the co-occurrence of two grammatical markers: connective and polarity marking in main and subordinate clauses.…”