Consumer Perception of Goat Cheese Using Word Association Technique

The word association technique was used to study the perception of Uruguayan consumers with regards to goat cheese and compare it with the perception of other cheeses sold in this market. For this, 149 subjects were presented with five different questionnaires to complete with their perceptions of the following cheeses Colonia, Parmesan, Camembert, goat and sheep cheese. The instructions were as follows： ＂Please, write down all the words, descriptions, associations, thoughts or feelings that come to your mind in connection with these products＂. Afterwards, these words were grouped into 16 categories： animal, color, like, dislike, eyes （of the cheese）, feelings, flavor, knowledge/consumption, meals and food, occasions, origin, price, quality, rind, smell and texture. Goat cheese was highly associated with factors related to flavor （51.7%） and texture （34.2%）. Participants used a wide range of terms, many contradictory （sour, bitter, strong, tasty, mild, bland, creamy, pasty, soft and hard） to describe this cheese. Such diversity in responses may reflect the difference among brands in Uruguay or lack of knowledge on goat cheese. There was also variation in perception in color categories （27.5%）, dislike （17.4%） and smell （21.5%）. The dislike for this cheese reflected in the choice of words such as ＂stinky＂ and ＂smelly＂ is mainly associated with negative connotations for smell （fetid and malodorous）. Three groups of consumers were identified based on the frequency of consumption of goat cheese. When frequency of consumption decreased, the percentage of mention of the categories like, meals and food and flavor also decreased, whereas the frequency of mention of the categories animal, knowledge/consumption and dislike increased. These results suggest that word association might be an interesting, easy and quick qualitative technique to gather useful information about consumer perceptions of cheese products.

An Investigation into the L2 Mental Lexicon of Chinese English Learners by Means of Word Association

The present study employs a word association test to investigate the nature of Chinese English learners＇ mental lexicon by comparing the association responses of native speakers and Chinese English learners. The result shows that there are significant differences in the structure of mental lexicons between Chinese English learners and native speakers. With regard to L1 mental lexicons, Chinese English learners have poorer concentricity of association and weaker association strength. Their association is more dependent on forms. They have no established systematic and stable networks between words. The semantic network in their mental lexicon is underdeveloped. The results of the experiments have some implications for L2 vocabulary teaching and learning.

Word Class Influence upon L1 and L2 English Word Association

This study explores word class influence upon L1 and L2 word association. The participants included 26 L1 English speakers and 28 advanced EFL learners who finished an English word association test that involved three types of stimuli： nouns, verbs and adjectives. Response words to the stimuli were classified into paradigmatic, syntagmatic, encyclopedic and form- based categories. Results show that： 1） L2 mental lexicon largely resembled that of L1 English speakers in that both were dominated by paradigmatic association, but L2 syntagmatic association was obviously weaker than that of L1 across the three word classes; 2） Verbs and adjectives demonstrated a greater potential to elicit syntagmatic responses than nouns in both L1 and L2 association; 3） Compared with verbs and adjectives, nouns were more paradigmatically challenging to L2 learners.

Text Rank for Domain Specific Using Field Association Words

Text Rank is a popular tool for obtaining words or phrases that are important for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This paper presents a practical approach for Text Rank domain specific using Field Association (FA) words. We present the keyphrase separation technique not for a single document, although for a particular domain. The former builds a specific domain field. The second collects a list of ideal FA terms and compounds FA terms from the specific domain that are considered to be contender keyword phrases. Therefore, we combine two-word node weights and field tree relationships into a new approach to generate keyphrases from a particular domain. Studies using the changed approach to extract key phrases demonstrate that the latest techniques including FA terms are stronger than the others that use normal words and its precise words reach 90%.

“My ADHD Hellbrain”: A Twitter Data Science Perspective on a Behavioural Disorder

Purpose: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) is a common behavioural condition. This article introduces a new data science method, word association thematic analysis, to investigate whether ADHD tweets can give insights into patient concerns and online communication needs. Design/methodology/approach: Tweets matching "my ADHD"(n=58,893) and 99 other conditions(n=1,341,442) were gathered and two thematic analyses conducted. Analysis 1: A standard thematic analysis of ADHD-related tweets. Analysis 2: A word association thematic analysis of themes unique to ADHD.Findings: The themes that emerged from the two analyses included people ascribing their brains agency to explain and justify their symptoms and using the concept of neurodivergence for a positive self-image. Research limitations: This is a single case study and the results may differ for other topics.Practical implications: Health professionals should be sensitive to patients' needs to understand their behaviour, find ways to justify and explain it to others and to be positive about their condition.Originality/value: Word association thematic analysis can give new insights into the(self-reported) patient perspective.

Research of Paraphrasing for Chinese Complex Sentences Based on Templates

Based on the paraphrasing of Chinese simple sentences,the complex sen­tence paraphrasing by using templates are studied.Through the classifica­tion of complex sentences,syntactic analysis and structural analysis,the proposed methods construct complex sentence paraphrasing templates that the associated words are as the core.The part of speech tagging is used in the calculation of the similarity between the paraphrasing sentences and the paraphrasing template.The joint complex sentence can be divided into parallel relationship,sequence relationship,selection relationship,progres­sive relationship,and interpretive relationship’s complex sentences.The subordinate complex sentence can be divided into transition relationship,conditional relationship,hypothesis relationship,causal relationship and objective relationship’s complex sentences.Joint complex sentence and subordinate complex sentence are divided to associated words.By using pretreated sentences,the preliminary experiment is carried out to decide the threshold between the paraphrasing sentence and the template.A small scale paraphrase experiment shows the method is availability,acquire the coverage rate of paraphrasing template 40.20%and the paraphrase correct rate 62.61%.

Chinese EFL Learners' Actual Word Processing and Lexical Learning in Performing a Collaborative Output Task

The word processing depth hypothesis implies a positive association between learners＇ word processing and their lexical learning. In research, learners＇ task-inherent involvement load （i.e., word processing） has not been found to be consistently associated with their lexical learning. Meanwhile, existing studies have not obtained consensus results, either, from directly associating learners＇ actual word processing and their lexical learning. Against this backdrop, this paper reports a study investigating the association between Chinese EFL learners＇ actual word processing and their lexical learning in performing a collaborative oral output task. Interactional and statistical analyses revealed that the participants engaged in four types of word processing; their overall word processing was significantly correlated with both their productive and receptive word acquisition and retention; their different types of word processing were significantly correlated with their productive word learning, but showed variances in correlations with their receptive word learning. The findings were discussed from the perspectives of word processing in collaborative output, word processing and lexical learning, and word processing and different modes of lexical learning.

The Developmental Route of Chinese English Learners’ Mental Lexicon: Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Perspectives

本研究旨在通过两个词汇联想实验,从共时和历时两个角度考察中国英语学习者心理词汇的发展路径。结果发现:四组被试对常用高频词的反应中语义联系占大多数,随着语言水平的提高,其心理词汇的语义联系愈来愈多。被试对低频词的反应中非语义联系最多,但随着词汇知识的增加,被试的反应从非语义向语义稳步发展,由语义倒退回非语义的现象也时有发生,表明英语词汇学习不是沿着线性路径发展的,而是在进步的大趋势下伴有倒退现象的发生。中国成年英语学习者心理词汇中聚合知识发展迅速,组合联系(即短语知识)较弱。本研究的发现进一步证实词汇习得的递增性特点,需要教师和学生做出长期的词汇习得计划,改变传统的词汇教学方法,加强词块和短语教学。

Sequential Back-Propagation

In this paper we consider the problem of sequential processing and present a sequen-tial model based on the back-propagation algorithm. This model is intended to deal with intrinsically sequential problems, such as word recognition, speech recognition,natural language understanding. This model can be used to train a network to learn the sequence of input patterns, in a fixed order or a random order. Besides, this mod-el is open- and partial-associative, characterized as 'recognizing while accumulating',which, as we argue, is mental cognition process oriented.